HiSilicon Kirin 970 - Android SoC Power & Performance Overview

Final Thoughts

What I wanted to showcase with this article was not only the particular advances of the Kirin 970, but also to use it as an opportunity to refresh everyone on the competitive landscape of the high-end Android SoC market. As the modern, post-iPhone smartphone ecosystem enters its 10-year anniversary, we’re seeing the increasing consolidation and vertical integration of the silicon that power today’s devices.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that Apple is the SoC trend setter that other companies are trying to copy, as much as other vendors are coming to the same conclusion Apple has: to be able to evolve and compete in a mature ecosystem you need to be able to control the silicon roadmap yourself. Otherwise you fall into the risk of not being able to differentiate from other vendors using similar component stacks, or risk not being competitive against those vendors who do have vertical integration. Apple was early to recognize this, and to date Huawei has been the only other OEM able actually realize this goal towards quasi-silicon independence.

I say quasi-independence because while the companies are designing their own SoCs, they are still relying on designs from the big IP licensing firms for key components such as the CPUs or GPUs. The Kirin 970 for example doesn’t really manage to differentiate itself from the Snapdragon 835 in regards to CPU performance or efficiency, as both ARM Cortex-A73 powered parts end up end up within margins of error of each other.

Snapdragon 820’s Kryo CPU core was a hard sell against a faster, more efficient, and smaller Cortex-A72. Samsung’s custom CPU efforts fared slightly better than Qualcomm’s, however the Exynos M1 and M2 haven’t yet managed to present a proper differentiating advantage against ARM’s CPUs. Samsung LSI’s performance claims for the Exynos 9810 are definitely eye-brow raising and might finally mark the point where years of investment and development on a custom CPU truly pay off, but Samsung’s mobile division has yet to demonstrate true and committed vertical integration. Considering all of this, HiSilicon’s decision to stick with ARM CPUs makes sense.

While Qualcomm has backpedalled on using its custom CPU designs in mobile, the company does demonstrate the potential and advantages of controlling your own IP designs when it comes to the GPU. To draw parallels, on the desktop GPU side of things we already see the competitive and market consequences of one vendor having a ~33% efficiency advantage (Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 vs AMD Radeon Vega 64). Just imagine that disparity increasing to over 75-90%, and that’s currently the state that we have in the mobile landscape (Snapdragon 835 vs Kirin 970). In both cases silicon vendors can compensate for efficiency and performance by going with a larger GPU, something that is largely invisible to the experience of the end-user but definitely an unsustainable solution as it eats into the gross margin of the silicon vendor. With PPA disparities on the high end nearing factors of 4x it definitely gives moment to pause and wonder where we’ll be heading in the next couple of years.

Beyond CPU, GPU and modem IP, SoCs have a lot more component blocks that are generally less talked about. Media blocks such as encoder/decoders eventually end up summarized as feature-checkboxes going up to X*Y resolution at Z frames per second. Even more esoteric are the camera pipelines such as the ISPs of modern SoCs. Here the lack of knowledge of how they work of what the capabilities are both part due to the silicon vendor’s secrecy but also due to the fact that currently truly differentiating camera experiences are defined by software algorithm implementations. The Kirin 970’s new use a Cadence Tensilica Vision P6 DSP definitely uplifts the camera capabilities of the devices powered by the new SoC, but that’s something that we’ll cover in a future device-centric review.

The NPU is a new class of IP whose uses are still in its infancy. Did the Kirin 970 need to have it included to be competitive? No. Does its addition make it more competitive? Yes. Well, maybe. With the software ecosystem lagging behind it’s still early to say how crucial neural network acceleration IPs in smartphones will become, and we have sort of a chicken-or-egg sort of situation where certain use-cases might simply not be feasible without the hardware. The marketing advantages for Huawei have been loud and clear, and it looks industry wide adoption is inevitable and on its way. I don’t foresee myself recommending or not recommending a device based on its existing, or lack of “AI” capabilities for some time to come, and similarly consumers should apply a wait & see approach to the whole topic.

While going on a lot of tangents and comparisons against competitors, the article’s main topic was the Kirin 970. HiSilicon’s new chipset proves itself as an excellent smartphone SoC that's well-able to compete with Qualcomm’s and Samsung’s best SoCs. There’s still a looming release schedule disadvantage as Huawei doesn’t follow the usual spring Android device refresh cycle, and we expect newer SoCs to naturally leapfrog the Kirin 970. This might change in the future as both semiconductor manufacturing and IP roadmaps might become out of sync with the spring device product launches.

I come back to the fact that Huawei is only one of two OEM vendors – and the only Android vendor – whom is leveraging vertical integratation between their SoC designs and the final phones. The company has come a long way over the past few years and we’ve seen solid, generational improvements in both silicon as well as the complete phones. What is most important is that the company is able to put both reasonable goals and execute on its targets. Talking to HiSilicon I also see the important trait of self-awareness of short-comings and the need to improve in key areas. Intel’s Andy Grove motto of “only the paranoid survive” seems apt to apply to Huawei as I think the company is heading towards the right directions in the mobile business and a key reason for their success.