Kirin 810 vs Kirin 980 vs Snapdragon 855: What’s the Difference?

Huawei just launched their new Nova 5 series smartphones, and along with that release, they also unveiled a whole new 7nm processor, Kirin 810. This is the second 7nm architecture processor from Huawei other than their flagship-specific Kirin 980 chip launched last year. The most significant thing about this processor is the AI accelerator built based on Huawei’s Da Vinci Architecture. This boosts the AI capabilities of the 810 chipsets even above the flagship Kirin 980 and the Snapdragon 855. The 7nm architecture of the 810 allows it to achieve 28 percent more efficiency than a more traditional 10nm architecture. Also, the transistor density is 64 percent higher than the 10nm architecture. Here, we will discuss the differences between Kirin 810, Kirin 980, and Snapdragon 855.

Huawei’s mid-range Kirin 810 SoC

Qualcomm has a reserved 600 series processor as a mid-range offering besides the top-of-the-line 800 series processors. However, Qualcomm released a new 700 series line processor as a high mid-range offering for smartphones lying between a flagship and a mid-range. Huawei was not about to sit idle to this, and the Kirin 810 is the answer we see to Qualcomm’s 700 series processors. The Kirin 810 also lies between their mid-range oriented Kirin 710 processor and the top-of-the-line Kirin 980 processor on devices like the Huawei P30 Pro and the Mate 20.

For the architectural build of the Kirin 810, we have two ARM Cortex A76 cores clocked at 2.33 GHz and six ARM Cortex A55 cores clocked at 1.88 GHz. For graphics-intensive tasks, we have the Mali-G52 operating at 820MHz. Since AI is something processor manufacturers have been pushing for a while now, Huawei here didn’t hold back anything and implemented an all-new Neural Processing Unit. In the Kirin 810, Huawei has its very own Da Vinci architecture, which enables them to achieve very high efficiency and high performance under different half-precision data types while enabling tensor computation. This is the first time we see Huawei using their own NPU, as in the case of Kirin 980, they just stook to NPU designed by Cambricon.

AI Benchmark Test: Kirin 810 beats Kirin 980 and Snapdragon 855

Kirin 810 is in top-of-the-line AI benchmark results, with the Nova 5 achieving a spot (with an AI Score of 33,863 points) even above the Asus Zenfone 6 powered by the latest top Snapdragon 855 processor. What it means is that Huawei’s AI game is going to top any other company’s AI implementation from now on. This new Huawei Nova 5, by using deep learning algorithms, can now implement night mode even on the front camera, which is first in case of any smartphone out there. What these algorithms do is that they enhance the human subject on the picture being processed while deposing dark backgrounds.

When we compare the chipsets in the AI benchmark test, we see that the Kirin 810 has scored 23,944 points, outperforming the Snapdragon 855 and the Kirin 980.

AnTuTu Benchmark Test: Kirin 810 Outperforms Snapdragon 730 & 710

In the Antutu benchmark test, the Kirin 810 SoC-powered Huawei Nova 5 scored 237437 points compared to 210052 points for the Snapdragon 730 and 140009 points for the Snapdragon 710. The GPU scores of the Kirin 810 are also higher than the Snapdragon 730 and 710.

Kirin 810 vs Kirin 980 vs Snapdragon 855: Specifications Comparison