HiSilicon Kirin 960s vs MediaTek MT8161 vs HiSilicon Kirin 960

HiSilicon Kirin 960s

The HiSilicon Kirin 960S is an ARM based mid-range octa-core SoC for smartphones and tablets, which was introduced with the 2018 10.5-inch Huawei MediaPad M5. Compared to the normal Kirin 960, the 960S offers an additional NPU for AI calculations from the Kirin 970. Looks like to be slower clocked than the older Kirin 960.

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.

MediaTek MT8161

The MediaTek MT8161 is an ARM based entry-level to mid-range SoC for (Android based) tablets. It offers four ARM Cortex-A53 processor cores (quad-core) that are clocked with up to 1.3 GHz. Furthermore, an ARM Mali-720 graphics card, a LPDDR3 memory controller (e.g., accessing 1 GB in the Lenovo Tab 2 A8-50), Bluetooth 4.0 and dual-band 802.11 b/g/n are integrated in the SoC.

The performance is situated in the entry level of 2015 and often similar to the Kirin 910T (see benchmark below).

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.