Hardware Overview and System Performance

The primal new slice of hardware plant in the Huawei Mate ten is the HiSilicon Kirin 970, a brand new SoC from Huawei'southward semiconductor division that raises the bar significantly compared to the Kirin 960 nosotros saw in devices like the Mate 9 and P10.

The key addition to the Kirin 970 is the Neural Processing Unit, or NPU, which is capable of 1.92 TFLOPS of FP16 operations. This is twice every bit high as the Neural Engine in the Apple A11, allowing the Kirin 970 to procedure neural network operations at a faster rate in a highly efficient way. How the NPU volition be used in actual applications remains to be seen, but it is a key component of the Kirin 970.

The Kirin 970's CPU is similar to the Kirin 960, with some small clock speed changes. There's yet eight CPU cores inside, split into two quad-core clusters: the high-operation ARM Cortex-A73 cluster clocked at ii.twoscore GHz, and the efficient Cortex-A53 cluster clocked at 1.80 GHz. Relative to the Kirin 960, this is a mere forty MHz clock speed increase on the A73 cores, and a 40 MHz decrease on the A53s. Expected functioning here is basically identical.

As for the GPU, the Kirin 970 packs a much larger GPU that should come up closer to the Adreno 540 in the popular Qualcomm Snapdragon 835. The Kirin 970 uses an ARM Mali-G72MP12 clocked up to 850 MHz, which provides an additional 4 cores over the Mali-G71MP8 in the Kirin 960. The SoC all the same supports UFS 2.1 storage, and aspects such every bit the dual fourteen-bit Internet service provider and video encode/decode engine appear unchanged.

One area HiSilicon has beefed upward is the integrated modem, which appears to outstrip the Snapdragon X16 in the Snapdragon 835. The Kirin 970's modem supports up to Category 18 LTE for 1200 Mbps downstream, through 3xCA, 256-QAM and 4x4 MIMO. There's also 150 Mbps upstream on 2xCA and 64-QAM.

Outside of the Kirin 970, the Huawei Mate 10 packs 4GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 64GB of internal storage, expandable through the microSD card slot. There's likewise NFC, Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth iv.2.

In terms of CPU-bound organisation operation, I wasn't expecting to see whatever real deviation relative to the Kirin 960 in the Huawei P10. The Kirin 960 already performs quite well in CPU limited workloads as the Cortex-A73 quad-cadre is very powerful.

However, the Kirin 970 in the Mate ten does appear to pull around 13 percentage ahead of the Kirin 960 in the P10, which could come up down to dissimilar clock speed profiles and throttling. The Kirin 970 is congenital on a 10nm process, compared to 16nm for the Kirin 960, and so there could be some efficiency advantages for the Kirin 970.

Upwards against the Snapdragon 835, the Kirin 970 is just slightly slower across our range of system benchmarks, clocking in a mere 4 percent slower. It does outperform the Samsung Exynos 8895 in some Milky way S8 and Note 8 variants though, to the tune of 23 percent.

Compared to older SoCs, we're seeing a 32 percent improvement over the Kirin 955 in the Huawei P9, which used the older Cortex-A72 CPU architecture. It's 30 percent faster than the Snapdragon 821, and 70 pct faster than the Snapdragon 810.