HiSilicon Kirin 960 vs HiSilicon Kirin 820

HiSilicon Kirin 960

The HiSilicon Kirin 960 is an ARM based high-end octa-core SoC for smartphones and tablet, which was introduced with the Huawei Mate 9 in November 2016. Besides 8 CPU cores (4x Cortex-A73, 4x Cortex-A53), the SoC is also equipped with a modern Mali-G71 MP8 graphics adapter, a dual-channel LPDDR4 memory controller as well as an LTE Cat. 12/13 modem. It is one of the fastest ARM SoCs in the end of 2016. The Kirin 960 is manufactured in a modern 16-nm process at TSMC.

HiSilicon Kirin 820

The HiSilicon Kirin 820 is a ARM-based mid-range Octa-Core-SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It was announced mid 2020 and contains 8 processor cores. One fast ARM Cortex-A76 core with up to 2.36 GHz, three addition A76 cores at up to 2.22 (as the old Kirin 810) and four efficiency Cortex-A55 cores at up to 1.88 GHz. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a 5G modem and a fast mid-range ARM Mali-G57 MP6 graphics card. For AI acceleration, the Kirin 820 integrates a DaVinci NPU.

The performance of the CPU part in our tests was slightly higher than the old Kirin 810 (thanks to the fast performance core). Huawei advertises 27% performance advantage for the CPU. The NPU and GPU have bigger performance gains with 73% and 38% more power.

The chip should also integrate Bluetooth 5 and WiFi 6.

The SoC is manufactured in the modern 7nm process at TSMC and therefore should be very energy efficient.