HiSilicon Kirin 970 vs MediaTek Dimensity 800U vs HiSilicon Kirin 710A

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.

MediaTek Dimensity 800U

The Mediatek Dimensity 800U is a fast mid-range SoC with an integrated 5G modem. It includes two fast ARM Cortex-A76 cores at up to 2.4 GHz and six power efficient Cortex-A55 cores at up to 2 GHz (Octa-Core with Heterogeneous Multi-Processing). Furthermore, the chip integrates a 3 core ARM Mali-G57 MC3 GPU, a Wi-fi 5 modem, a LPDDR4x memory controller, a AI processing unit (APU 3.0) and video de- and encoding.

Compared to the Dimensity 820, the 800U offers lower clocked A76 cores and a slower GPU.

The Dimensity 800U is manufactured in the modern 7nm process and should be very power efficient.

HiSilicon Kirin 710A

The HiSilicon Kirin 710A is a ARM-based mid-range Octa-Core-SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It is based on the Kirin 710, but manufactured in 14nm FinFET at SMIC (China) versus the TSMC in 12nm. It was announced mid 2020 and contains 8 processor cores (4x Cortex-A73 at up to 2 GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 at up to 1.7 GHz, BigLITTLE), an ARM Mali G51 MP4, a dual-channel LPDDR4 memory controller and a LTE radio (600 Mbps down, 150 Mbps up). Therefore, the CPU part is similar to the Kirin 960 and 970 (both higher clocked), but the graphics card is a lot slower.