HiSilicon Kirin 970 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 712 vs HiSilicon Kirin 710

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 712

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 712 (SD712) is a fast mid-range ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. Compared to the Snapdragon 710 predecessor, the 712 offers a 10% faster CPU and GPU due to clock rate increases (100 MHz for the CPU e.g.). It was announced early 2019 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 2.3 GHz) and six small cores (most likely based on Coretx-A55 at up to 1.7 or 1.8 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.

The Snapdragon 712 is manufactured in the modern 10 nm process at Samsung (10LPP).

HiSilicon Kirin 710

The HiSilicon Kirin 710 is a ARM-based mid-range Octa-Core-SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It was announced mid 2018 and contains 8 processor cores (4x Cortex-A73 at up to 2.2 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. 

The Kirin 710 is manufactured at TSMC in 12 nm (compared to the 16nm Kirin 960 and 10nm Kirin 970).

The HiSilicon Kirin 710F is the same chip with a different package (FCCSP - Flip Chip Chip Scale Package) and offers the same specifications (see e.g. our review of the Huawei P Smart Z).