HiSilicon Kirin 970 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 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.

Qualcomm Snapdragon 710

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 (SD710) is a fast mid-range ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. Announced in early 2018, the SD710 is the first of the 700 series and positions itself between the 600 series (e.g. Snapdragon 660) and 800 series (e.g. Snapdragon 845). It integrates 8 Kryo 360 cores devided in two big cores (most likely based on Cortex-A75 at up to 2.2 GHz) and six small cores (most likely based on Coretx-A55 at up to 1.7 GHz). The memory controller supports LPDDR4X and the integrated graphics card is called Adreno 616. The X15 LTE modem supports 4x4 MIMO with up to 800 MBbit/s download and 150 MBit/s upload.

Compared to the older Snapdragon 660, Qualcomm advertises the CPU clusters to be up to 20% faster and the GPU up to 35 %.

The Snapdragon 710 is manufactured in the modern 10 nm process at Samsung (10LPP).

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.