Has Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 950, hailed as the new benchmark in the industry, really overtaken Samsung and Qualcomm?

In the environment where Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 was delayed in production and Samsung's "Mongoose" had not yet officially debuted, Huawei fired the first shot in the "Chinese Chip" counterattack in the mobile phone chip market in 2016 .  

In early November, Huawei released its latest mobile phone processor chip "HiSilicon Kirin 950 " , and soon installed this chip on the Huawei Mate8 released at the end of the month.  

Huawei's first shot was really loud, and because of its "Chinese chip" halo, it attracted unprecedented attention. Huawei has been iterating its mobile phone chips for many years, but it has always been tepid. Why is the Kirin 950 so popular when it comes out?  

Let's first take a look at how the media evaluates Huawei's "Chinese chip"...

So, is this really the case? Let us try to analyze it.  

According to the above statement, Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 950 currently outperforms Samsung and Qualcomm, and their statement has been confirmed by a benchmark software called AnTuTu. We will not discuss whether the benchmark software nicknamed "Entertainment Rabbit" is convincing enough, but first look at the benchmark chart it provides.

From the chart we can see that the most powerful mobile phone chips are still Apple's latest A9 and the high-frequency A8X chip used in iPad Air 2. The third is Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 950 , which beats Samsung and Qualcomm.  

However, if we observe carefully, we can easily find that the products used to compare with Kirin 950 , except Apple's A9 , Samsung's 7420 and Qualcomm's 810 were all released last year. Is it worth being happy to compare this year's new products with competitors' old products?  

You should know that the rivals of Kirin 950 are not Samsung 7420 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 , but the upcoming Qualcomm 820 and Samsung 8890 codenamed "Mongoose" . Therefore, starting from the essence, we will rationally analyze the differences between Kirin 950 and 820 and 8890 from the aspects of architecture, CPU , GPU , baseband, etc.  

As we all know, Kirin 950 uses TSMC's 16nm FF+ process, with a transistor density twice that of the previous generation; it integrates four 2.3GHz A72 cores + four 1.8GHz A53 cores, and the GPU is the new MaliT880 mp4 with a frequency of 900MHz. According to the information released by Huawei, the performance of A72 is 11% higher than that of A57, and the power consumption is also reduced by 20%; TSMC's 16nm FF+ is an enhanced version of the standard 16nm FinFET, and the former has better performance and power consumption than the latter.  

In addition, Kirin 950 is also equipped with an i5 coprocessor and uses Huawei's self-developed ISP.

Let's start with the process. The Kirin 950 uses TSMC's 16nm FF+ process, while Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and Samsung 8890 use Samsung's 14nm process. Although it seems that 16nm is slightly inferior to 14nm, the actual difference is not that big.

In terms of CPU, Kirin 950 adopts the public version architecture provided by ARM, integrating 4 2.3GHz A72 cores + 4 1.8GHz A53 cores.

The new generation Qualcomm 820 uses the independent quad-core Kyro architecture (2×2.2GHz+2×1.7GHz), and the Samsung 8890 integrates 4 independent architecture cores and 4 Cortex A53 cores .

You should know that the ARM public version architecture is just a general framework and has not been optimized for each mobile phone. Therefore, capable manufacturers usually optimize the performance and power consumption of mobile phones and redesign the architecture. Therefore, Qualcomm 820 uses the Kyro architecture designed by Byte, while Samsung uses the mongoose independent architecture + public version architecture.

In terms of GPU, Huawei HiSilicon still uses Mali-T800 provided by ARM.   Customized quad- core design .

Although Samsung also uses this GPU, it customized 12 cores, and its performance is undoubtedly much stronger than the quad-core 950.

Qualcomm has been using its own technology in GPU and has been in the leading position for many years. According to Qualcomm, the new generation of GPU, Adreno530, can provide up to 40% of the graphics processing power compared to Adreno430 , while also reducing power consumption by 40%. In this regard, Huawei HiSilicon has no advantage in GPU compared to Samsung and Qualcomm.

Finally, let’s talk about the most important part of mobile phone communication - baseband.  

Huawei has always been most proud of its baseband, and it is also the only part that can compete with Qualcomm. Since 2012, it has taken the lead in launching the Balong 710 that supports LTE Cat.4, and in 2014 it was ahead of other manufacturers in launching the first LTE Cat.6 baseband.  

However, Kirin 950 did not integrate the baseband that was previously predicted to support LTE Cat.10. Instead, it unexpectedly implemented the idea of ​​"just enough is enough" and directly used the Balong 720 on last year's Kirin 920. This baseband supports Cat.6 networks, with a maximum downlink speed of only 300Mbps, which is mediocre.  

According to the information previously released by Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 820 supports Cat.12 for downlink (maximum transmission speed of 600Mbps) and Cat.13 for uplink (maximum 150Mbps). At least in terms of baseband, Kirin 950 is outperformed by Snapdragon 820.  

And most importantly, Qualcomm still has a trump card in its hand - CDMA network baseband. You should know that there are not many baseband manufacturers that support CDMA network standards. If you want to make CDMA or full network standard mobile phones, there are currently only two solutions.

One is to adopt Qualcomm baseband or directly use Qualcomm's mobile phone chips, so there is a frequent joke in the industry that Qualcomm "sells baseband and gives away chips."  

The second method is to add an external CDMA baseband to the original baseband, but this will increase power consumption and the stability will be slightly different from the first method. The first method is the mainstream practice of Android phone manufacturers, while Huawei has been using the second method. So in this regard, although Huawei is better than many other chip manufacturers, it still loses to Qualcomm.  

Finally, I would like to quote a table made by a Sina netizen to help everyone better understand the independent technologies of various manufacturers in mobile phone chips.

Conclusion: Regarding those articles on the market that are praising the Kirin 950 to the point of being overrated, I believe that although Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 950 chip performance and technology have made great progress compared to before, enabling it to gain a foothold in the market in 2016, it is still a long way from top chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Samsung. The progress of domestic chips is worthy of recognition, but we must not get lost in complacency. I hope Huawei can continue to work hard and gradually narrow the gap and catch up with Qualcomm and Samsung.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.