HiSilicon Kirin 970 vs HiSilicon Kirin 935 vs HiSilicon Kirin 960

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.

HiSilicon Kirin 935

The HiSilicon Kirin 935 is an ARM-based octa-core SoC (system-on-a-chip) for smartphones and tablets. It was launched in the first half of 2015. It integrates two quad-core clusters of Cortex-A53 cores (big.LITTLE). The performance cluster clocks at up to 2.2 GHz, the power saving cluster at up to 1.5 GHz. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a ARM Mali-T628 MP4 graphics card and LTE Cat. 6 modem. The SoC is manufactured in 28nm and thanks to the small Cortex-A53 cores also suited for smaller smartphones.

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.