HiSilicon Kirin 970 vs HiSilicon Kirin 980 vs HiSilicon Kirin 820

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 980

The HiSilicon Kirin 980 is an ARM based high-end octa-core SoC for smartphones and tablets, which was introduced with the Huawei Mate 20 Pro in late 2018. It integrates eight CPU cores in three clusters. The performance cluster contains two Cortex-A76 cores with up to 2.6 GHz, the balanced cluster contains also two Cortex-A76 cores but with only up to 1.92 GHz and finally the power saving cluster contains four small ARM Cortex-A53 cores with up to 1.8 GHz. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a modern LTE radio with Cat 21/18 (max. 1400 Mbps download, 200 Mbps upload), 2x faster dual ISP (versus 970), a LPDDR4X 2133 MHz memory controller (34.1 GB/s versus 29.9 GB/s of the Kirin 970) and a 2160p30 H.265 video encoder (2160p60 decoding). The Kirin 980 is produced in the modern 7nm process at TSMC as the first Android SoC (after the Apple A12).

HiSilicon Kirin 820

The HiSilicon Kirin 820 is a ARM-based mid-range Octa-Core-SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It was announced mid 2020 and contains 8 processor cores. One fast ARM Cortex-A76 core with up to 2.36 GHz, three addition A76 cores at up to 2.22 (as the old Kirin 810) and four efficiency Cortex-A55 cores at up to 1.88 GHz. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a 5G modem and a fast mid-range ARM Mali-G57 MP6 graphics card. For AI acceleration, the Kirin 820 integrates a DaVinci NPU.

The performance of the CPU part in our tests was slightly higher than the old Kirin 810 (thanks to the fast performance core). Huawei advertises 27% performance advantage for the CPU. The NPU and GPU have bigger performance gains with 73% and 38% more power.

The chip should also integrate Bluetooth 5 and WiFi 6.

The SoC is manufactured in the modern 7nm process at TSMC and therefore should be very energy efficient.