Huawei announced the first AI mobile computing chip back in October. Later it came in with the Huawei Mate 10, which is the first phone running on a SoC supporting artificial intelligence. Surprisingly, many people didn’t pay too much attention to the performance provided by this chip. But when the cheaper variant of the Mate 10 was launched today, the net began buzzing about its great performance. If you guess, we are talking about the Huawei Honor V10, which is the second phone after the Mate 10/Plus to run on the latest creation of Huawei.
The Kirin 970 is a flagship chip using TSMC 10nm process node. It is the world’s first built-in standalone NPU (neural network unit) AI computing platform. Actually, we like to repeat this phrase every time we talk about the Kirin 970. When compared to the four Cortex-A73 cores, the Kirin’s computing architecture delivers about 50x energy efficiency and 25x improved performance when it comes to processing the same AI application tasks. This simply means the Kirin 970 chip provides better and faster performance.
Gizchina News of the week
Also Read: Kirin 970 is official, trumps Snapdragon 835 in performance
Other than that, the Kirin 970’s innovative HiAI mobile computing architecture is considered as the most efficient use of the heterogeneous computing architecture. It maximizes the performance of CPU / GPU / ISP / DSP / NPU. Of course, it’s implemented via the dedicated NPU that accelerates the performance and energy efficiency much better than the CPU and GPU. To understand what this means let’s take a glance at the first benchmark scores of the Huawei Honor V10 and its Kirin 970 chip.
As shown, AnTuTu points are 170,000, which is almost identical to the Snapdragon 835 results. But when it comes to GeekBench, we see the Kirin 970 outruns its rival. The former one scores 1921 at single-core performance, while the multi-core performance reached 6789. This means its way better than what we see on the Xiaomi Mi 6 running on the Snapdragon 835.
Enough with all those horse shits about Kirin 970… The worst part is that GPU is very un efficient and it loses in the real usage by considerable margins from Adreno 540 (S835), I will leave AI to PR agents as you me & everyone else won’t have much real usage from it anytime soon. The most advanced part of the Kirin 970 SoC & a top leading one in the smartphone industry (which somehow all of you so called journalists managed to miss thanks to lack of knowledge and ignorance) is actually implemented DSP core which is a Tensilica P6 used for a leading video decoding/encoding capabilities but also very good for VC & AI. If you ask me the dedicated neutral network processing block Huawei integrated is a huge waist of silicone (black dead one), would be much better they used MP P6 DSP & larger far less clocked GPU. The HPC story is also a huge garbage as I know where logic stands.