HiSilicon Kirin 980 vs Samsung Exynos 9810

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).

Samsung Exynos 9810

The Samsung Exynos 9 9810 is a mobile SoC for smartphones and tablets. It was announced early 2018 and should be integrated in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S9 series (at least partly). It integrates eight CPU cores (octa core) in two clusters. The performance cluster integrates four Samsung M3 at 2.9 GHz and the power efficiency cluster four small ARM Cortex-A55 cores at 1.9 GHz. The Samsung M3 cores are based on Samsungs own design and now offer a wider pipeline, improved cache memory and bigger caches. This leads to a twice as fast single-core performance and a 40 percent improved multi-core performance according to Samsung (most likely compared to the previous Exynos 8898).

The integrated LTE modem also got a siginifcant upgrade and now supports Cat.18/13 LTE for up to 1.2 Gbps download and 200 Mbps upload. This is achieved with 6x20 MHz CA, 256-QAM in download and 2x20 MHz in upload.

As a GPU, Samsung integrates a ARM Mali G72MP18 (only 18 clusters, compared to the 20 clusters of the predecessor G71MP20). Most likely Samsung increases performance due to a higher core clock of the graphics card.

The memory controller looks similar to the 8898 and supports LPDDR4x 1800 MHz. The video engine now also supports 10 bit videos (as before 4k120 H.265/HEVC, H.264 and VP9 de- and encoding). 

The SoC is produced at Samsung in the new 10nm LPP process (the Exynos 8898 still used the 10nm LPE process) that should also help with some of the performance gains.