HiSilicon Kirin 980 vs HiSilicon Kirin 710

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 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).