HiSilicon Kirin 970 vs Marvell Armada PXA1908

HiSilicon Kirin 970

The HiSilicon Kirin 970 is an ARM based high-end octa-core SoC for smartphones and tablet, which was introduced with the Huawei Mate 10 in late 2017. Besides 8 CPU cores (4x Cortex-A73, 4x Cortex-A53), the SoC is also equipped with a modern Mali-G72 MP12 graphics adapter, a dual-channel LPDDR4 memory controller as well as an LTE (4x4 MIMO, 5-band-carrier-aggregation, QAM-256, up to 1.2 Gbit/s) modem.

The performance cluster is clocked at up to 2.4 GHz and the four A53 power saving cores with up to 1.8 GHz. The performance should improve by about 20 percent according to Huawei and the power consumption reduced by 20 percent.

On the chip HiSilicon also included a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for running machine learning tasks very efficiently compared to the CPU cores.

Marvell Armada PXA1908

The Marvell Armada PXA1908 is an ARM based low end SoC for smartphones and tablets. The chip was announced in late 2014 and integrates four 64-Bit Cortex-A53 processor cores with up to 1.2 GHz. As a graphics card, the SoC integrates a Vivante GC7000UL. Furthermore, a LPDDR2/3 memory controller and a HSPA+/WCDMA/LTE Cat. 4 (max. 150 Mbit/s) radio is integrated. The SoC is manufactured in 28nm and also suited for small smartphones.