HiSilicon Kirin 970 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 732G

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 732G

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 732G (SD732G Mobile Platform) is a fast mid-range ARM-based SoC largely found on Android tablets and smartphones. It integrates eight cores (octa-core) divided into two clusters. A fast performance cluster contains two ARM Cortex-A76 cores clocked at up to 2.3 GHz and a power efficiency cluster with six small ARM Cortex-A55 cores at up to 1.8 GHz. Depending on the workload only single clusters or all cores can run at different clock speeds. Compared to the 730G, the 732G offers a 100 MHz higher A76 CPU clock.

Compared to the normal Snapdragon 730, the 732G is optimized for gaming. This means the graphics card is higher clocked (also compared to the 730G, Qualcomm stateds 15% more performance) and the chip also offers optimized WiFi. The GPU also supports higher resolutions. Furthermore, the SoC is able to record videos in 720p with up to 960 fps.

The chip includes a range of other features like a fast X15 LTE radio (800 Mbits Cat 15 download, 150 Mbps Cat 13 upload), one of the first Wi-Fi 6 wireless radios (802.11ax), satellite positioning (GPS, QZSS, GLONASS, SBAS, Beidou, Galileo), USB-C 3.1, Spectra 350 ISP, Hexagon 688 DSP, H.265 4K30 video en- and decode, an LPDDR4X-3733 dual-channel memory controller and a Adreno 618 Grafikkarte.

The Snapdragon 732G is manufactured in the modern 8 nm process at Samsung.