HiSilicon Kirin 970 vs Mediatek Helio G99

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 Helio G99

The Mediatek Helio G99 is a mainstream ARM SoC for smartphones (mainly Android based) that was introduced in 2022. It is manufactured in a 6 nm FinFET process and is equipped with 2x big ARM Cortex-A76 cores with up to 2.2 GHz and 6x small and power efficient ARM Cortex-A55 cores (max. 2 GHz) in two clusters (bigLITTLE). The chip integrates an ARM Mali-G57 MC2 (two cores). Compared to the older Helio G96, the G99 is manufactured in the more recent 6nm process and clocks higher.

Furthermore, the integrated LTE / 4G modem supports Cat-13 download speeds. Wi-Fi 5 is also integrated (a/b/g/n/ac). The memory controller supportsLPDDR4x with up to 4,266 Mbps.