Huawei Mate 9, which recently launched is equipped with the latest flagship Huawei Kirin 960 chip, based on TSMC 16nm process. It’s CPU design consists eight-cores, 4 * A73 @ 2.36GHz 4*[email protected]. Qualcomm Launched Snapdragon 820 couple of months ago. THis is the same chipset which comes in Pixel and Oneplus 3T. It’s said to be the most powerful chipset in mobile computing until now. Let’s see what’s the true story.

Also See: Device using Snapdragon 821

Let’s see the actual test of Huawei Kirin 960 performance, including CPU and GPU performance, with Qualcomm Snapdragon 821.

Performance Test (Kirin 960 vs Snapdragon 821)

GeekBench 4 processor performance test, Snapdragon 821 scored 1862 points on single-core test and with multi-core it stands at 4356 points. While Kirin 960 received 1944 points on single-core and 6119 on multi-core. Huawei seems to be significantly ahead, we can see that the public version of A73 ARM architecture has very eye-catching performance.

Graphics Test (Kirin 960 vs Snapdragon 821)

In GFXBench 4.0 graphics test, we measured the GPU (graphics processing unit) performance. Due to Upgrade of GPU of Huawei Kirin GPU 960 from Kirin 950 Mali T880mp4 (quad-core) to the ARM latest generation of Mali G71mp8 (eight-core). The performance of Kirin 960 has doubled in GFXBench 4.0 tests, but failed to exceed Adreno 530 GPU of Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 performance.

In comparison between Kirin 960 and Snapdragon 821. Huawei Kirin 960 CPU is more powerful performance than the multi-core performance Qualcomm Xiaolong 821.  Kirin 960 GPU went little lost in comparison the Snapdragon’s Adreno 530.

Game Tests (Kirin 960 vs Snapdragon 821)

We played couple of games including King of Glory for more than 20 minutes on the devices having these processors.

Through the above tests it can be seen that Snapdragon 821 GPU performance is stronger. But the running game requires not only GPU rendering, CPU power is also needed. Thanks to a more powerful CPU of Kirin 960, which lead to better performance in the second game. The second game was not much graphics intensive which faded away little shine from the Snapdragon 821.

Overall

Antutu Benchmark Comparison

1. Snapdragon 821 : 160,856
2. Kirin 960 : 129,442

Summary:

There are only few games which comes with the strong GPU demand. Most of the times only mid level GPU demand remains. We can say If you need more CPU power and don;t rely much on Graphics unit than you can choose Kirin 960 from Huawei. Otherwise, Snapdragon is there for you.