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Kirin 970 benchmark scores place it on par with the Snapdragon 835

Huawei Mate 10 Pro.
Huawei Mate 10 Pro.
Qualcomm has something of a monopoly on the Android market at the moment, so it's particularly impressive that Huawei's in-house Kirin 970 is able to compete with the Snapdragon 835 on all fronts.

The Huawei Mate 10 was launched a few days ago and, with it being the first device to be powered by the new Kirin 970, we finally have a chance of knowing what HiSilicon's much-lauded SoC is capable of. It turns out the Kirin 970 actually does a great job at competing with the Snapdragon 835, which is more than we can say for some other industry rivals.

The Mate 10 made the trip to AnTuTu a few days ago, and delivered impressive scores that put in the same ballpark as its Snapdragon 835-powered rivals.  It recorded a total score of 173,757, which isn't so far off from the scores of 180,000+ that have been registered on the Snapdragon 835. AnTuTu measures a number of departments, though, so this score isn't entirely representative of actual performance. In fact, there's a chance the Kirin 970 may actually outperform the Snapdragon 835 in computational tasks, if Geekbench scores are anything to go by.

The Kirin 970 recorded a 36,590 score in the CPU department, and a 65,511 in the 3D one. The Snapdragon 835, on the other hand, averages CPU scores of about 40,000, and 3D scores of 76,000. The discrepancy between the 3D scores of both SoCs is particularly noteworthy, with a differential of over 10,000 showing that the Mali-G72 MP12 on the Kirin 970 still has a lot to do to catch up to the Adreno 540 on the Snapdragon 835.

Geekbench scores better represent raw performance, with the Kirin 970 recording a 1902 single-core score, which shows that the Cortex-A73 cores on the Kirin 970 don't necessarily lose out to the Kryo cores on the 835. The device performed much better on multi-core tests, with a 6783 score placing the Mate 10 alongside the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 at the top of the Android food chain.

The Honor 9 which was released months ago recorded some similarly impressive scores even though it was powered by the Kirin 960. That considered, there's a chance that the Kirin 970 actually outperforms the Snapdragon 835 when software is optimized, as EMUI 8.0 is still only a new release.

Typical Snapdragon 835 scores (Source: CNET)
Typical Snapdragon 835 scores (Source: CNET)
Huawei Mate 10 Pro Antutu scores. (Source: Gizmochina)
Huawei Mate 10 Pro Antutu scores. (Source: Gizmochina)
Geekbench scores. (Source: GSMArena)
Geekbench scores. (Source: GSMArena)
 

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2017 10 > Kirin 970 benchmark scores place it on par with the Snapdragon 835
Ricci Rox, 2017-10-19 (Update: 2017-10-19)