HiSilicon Kirin 960: A Closer Look at Performance and Power
by Matt Humrick on March 14, 2017 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Mobile
- SoCs
- HiSilicon
- Cortex A73
- Kirin 960
Final Words
HiSilicon’s Kirin 950 delivered impressive performance and efficiency, raising our expectations for its successor. And on paper at least, the Kirin 960 seems better in every way. It incorporates ARM’s latest IP, including A73 CPUs, the new Mali-G71 GPU with more cores, and a CCI-550 interconnect. It offers other improvements too, such as a new modem that supports higher LTE speeds and UFS 2.1 support. But when it comes to performance and efficiency, the Kirin 960 improves in some areas and regresses in others.
The Kirin 960’s A73 CPU cores are marginally faster than the 950’s A72 cores when handling integer workloads, with a more noticeable lead over Qualcomm’s Kryo and the older A57. When looking at floating-point IPC, the opposite is true, with Qualcomm’s Kryo and Kirin 950’s A72 cores posting better results than the 960’s A73.
Some of this performance regression may be explained by Kirin 960’s memory performance. Both latency and read bandwidth improve for its larger 64KB L1 cache, but write bandwidth is lower than Kirin 950. The 960’s L2 cache bandwidth is also lower for both read and write. Its latency to main memory improves by 25%, however, and bandwidth improves by an impressive 69%.
What’s really disappointing (and puzzling) about Kirin 960, though, is that its CPU efficiency is actually worse than the 950’s. ARM did a lot of work to reduce the A73’s power consumption relative to the A72, but the Kirin 960’s A73 cores see a substantial power increase over the 950’s A72 cores. The poor efficiency numbers are likely a combination of HiSilicon’s specific implementation and the switch to the 16FFC process. This was definitely an unexpected result considering the Mate 9’s excellent battery life. Fortunately, Huawei was able to save power elsewhere, such as the display, to make up for the SoC’s power increase, but it’s difficult not to think about how much better the battery life could have been.
Power consumption for Kirin 960’s GPU is even worse, with peak power numbers that are entirely inappropriate for a smartphone. Part of the problem is poor efficiency, again likely a combination of implementation and process, which is only made worse by an overly aggressive 1037MHz peak operating point that only serves to improve the spec sheet and benchmark results.
The Kirin 960 is difficult to categorize. It’s definitely not a clear upgrade over the 950, but it does just enough things right that we cannot dismiss it outright either. For example, its generally improved integer performance and lower system memory latency give it an advantage over the 950 in many real-world workloads. We cannot completely condemn its GPU either, because its sustained performance, at least in the Mate 9’s large aluminum chassis, is on par with or better than competing flagship phones, as is its battery life when gaming. Certainly the Mate 9 proves that Kirin 960 is a viable flagship SoC as long as Huawei puts in the effort to work around its flaws. But with a new generation of 10nm SoCs just around the corner, those flaws will only become more apparent.
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hans_ober - Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - link
A10 deepdive?Araa - Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - link
Thats the smell of a dead elephant in the room.MrSpadge - Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - link
Wrong thread, this one is about Kirin 960.niva - Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - link
Well I for one am glad to see this deepdive into the performance. It gives a much more complete picture of what's happening. People on Android Central were giving this chip such glowing reviews and I really wasn't sold on it yet. That being said I'm fairly confident AC is sponsored by Huawei because any phone they push out gets glowing reviews despite it's Chinese hackware. Only Huawei phone worth buying is the Nexus 6P and still remains so. This won't change even if/when they actually do make better hardware.close - Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - link
"Only Huawei phone worth buying is the Nexus 6P [...]. This won't change even if/when they actually do make better hardware."So you "know" that even if they make better hardware only the 6P will be worth buying? Crystal ball much? Are you also sponsored by somebody or did you just choose ignorance? And I'm being delicate here.
BertrandsBox - Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - link
"Only Huawei phone worth buying is the Nexus 6P and still remains so. This won't change even if/when they actually do make better hardware."If Android Central gets accused of hiding sponsorship from Huawei, do silly comments like these make you someone who's being paid by Huawei's competitors?
Alexvrb - Tuesday, March 14, 2017 - link
A lot of reviewers take free bread. Especially ones that aren't making enough off ads alone, or that have a personal slant, etc. I'm not saying that includes AC, but you shouldn't dismiss it so casually either. The most effective place to apply grease is reviewers and review sites. The Kirin 960 is obviously a step sideways, so to give it glowing reviews is hilarious.However... even though the process and design they chose may be hindering power consumption at these clocks, they did have another goal in mind. Cost. If they really achieved such massive increases in density, and have a similar % yield, they can sell bucketloads of these chips for cheap. So at least for the mid-range devices, these would be plenty good for the foreseeable future.
close - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
A lot of internet commentators are paid to praise one sine or company and accuse competing ones. This is an undisputed fact so you shouldn't dismiss this casually.The point wasn't whether AC is or isn't on Huawei's payroll but rather the attitude of the person commenting who basically disqualified themselves by saying that "even with better products they will never be worth buying".That sound like the user doesn't actually care about the product or the facts, and is only here to criticize Huawei and anything that might be related to them.
And no matter what he says in the future none of it can be taken seriously and contain any trace of objective value ;).
fanofanand - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
Where does one go to cash in on the whole "paid internet commenting" bit? I'd like some of that "internet money" please :)Meteor2 - Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - link
Yeah me too