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The Kirin 970 is better than the Snapdragon 835, Master Lu declares

HiSilicon's Kirin has come a long way. (Source: AnandTech)
HiSilicon's Kirin has come a long way. (Source: AnandTech)
Master Lu, a popular Chinese benchmark, has revealed performance scores for the top SoCs in the business, with the Kirin 970 edging out Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 to first place.

Benchmarks are a dime a dozen these days. While they are tools with a place in the tech industry, their importance may be a bit overexaggerated. Yet another benchmark platform has given its opinion on the state of the SoCs in the Android world. According to Master Lu, a benchmark supposedly popular in China, the Kirin 970 is the best Android SoC in the world.

We're not certain of Master Lu's mechanics but its judgment isn't exactly unbelievable. According to the benchmark, the Kirin 970 pipes the Snapdragon 835 to first place by just a tiny margin. The HiSilicon SoC was released towards the end of 2017, months after the Snapdragon 835, so this would be about par, more so when other benchmarks already placed the last-gen Kirin 960 infinitesimally close to the Snapdragon 835.

Going by Master Lu's data, the Kirin 970 records a CPU score of 48,707 and a GPU score of 75,507. The Snapdragon 835 comes in second with equivalent scores of 46,864 and 75,813 respectively. The GPU score here is particularly surprising, though, as other benchmarks place the Adreno 540 on the Snapdragon 835 slightly above the Mali G72-MP12 on the Kirin 970. Good old Master Lu must have other ideas.

In third place comes the Exynos 8895, the SoC seen on the eight-gen Samsung Galaxy devices, followed by the Kirin 960, Snapdragon 821, Snapdragon 820, Helio X30, Exynos 8890, and Snapdragon 660. The Kirin 955 rounds up the top ten.

The Helio X30, in particular, is disappointing, as it was designed to be a competitor to the top three but only puts up numbers that rival 2016's flagship SoCs.

This is an Android-only chart, of course, as Apple's recent SoCs would lead the pack if they were included. The recently released Snapdragon 845 would also be ahead of the Kirin 970 if included but it has yet to make its way into consumer hands, so it's excluded.

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2018 01 > The Kirin 970 is better than the Snapdragon 835, Master Lu declares
Ricci Rox, 2018-01-16 (Update: 2018-01-16)