The Mate 20 & Mate 20 Pro Review: Kirin 980 Powering Two Contrasting Devices
by Andrei Frumusanu on November 16, 2018 8:10 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Huawei
- Mobile
- Kirin 980
- Mate 20
- Mate 20 Pro
Battery Life - Contrasting Two Models
The Mate 20 comes with an LCD screen and a 4000mAh battery. The screen is slightly larger in area than that of the Mate 20 Pro, who in turn uses an OLED screen, but also features a slightly larger 4200mAh battery.
The Kirin 980 of both phones should provide great efficiency, although I have to note that my units of the Mate 20 Pro seemed to have a worse binned SoC, as active system power consumption (normalised for screen and idle) in SPEC was about 8-9% higher than on the Mate 20.
In the web browsing test, we see the regular Mate 20 post some new record battery life results, with a staggering runtime of 13.5h. Here we finally see Huawei replicate the results of the Mate 9, which similarly had a very efficient screen. The efficiency of the SoC also augments the phone above that of other devices.
On the Mate 20 Pro, we see the previously discovered screen panel issues come back to haunt it. Even though it has a larger battery and a smaller screen than the Mate 20, the more expensive phone fares worse off in the test. Unfortunately the large base power handicap of the phone along with slightly worse luminance efficiency is the main cause of the results.
In regards to the Mate 10 results: The actual battery life of devices on the stock firmware should be better, unfortunately I haven’t been able to get to get back to this version as my units have a variant that unlock the memory controller to its full speed (and reduces battery life).
In PCMark, we see a similar regression on the part of the Mate 20 Pro – the regular version is achieving excellent results. Here the test is favourable to OLED devices, as evidenced by the P20 Pro leading all our results, however again this increase base power consumption of the Mate 20 Pro costs it a lot of lifetime which ends up it having much reduced battery life compared to where the SoC and battery capacity should have been capable of.
Overall, there’s two conclusions here in regards to battery life:
The Mate 20 is just an outstanding device and is currently showcasing absolutely leading battery life. Most devices with such runtimes are lower or mid-range phones with large battery capacities. In the high end, the Mate 20 is essentially in a tier of its own as it achieves this excellent battery life result while also showcasing the best performance of an Android device.
The Mate 20 Pro’s result and conclusion is a bit more muted. Its battery life isn’t bad, but falls short of expectations. Here the 4200mAh battery serves as no more than to just compensate for the inefficient display.
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Javert89 - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Perhaps the most interesting part is missing :( how is working (performance and power) the middle cluster at 1.92 ghz? Same performance of 2.8ghz A75 at half power usage?Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
I couldn't test it without root.ternnence - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
try syscall(__NR_sched_setaffinity, pid, sizeof(mask), &mask)ternnence - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
FYI,https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7467848/is-it-...pjcamp - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
If it weren't for Huawei's aggressively belligerent stance against unlocked bootloaders . . . .name99 - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Andrei, can you please explain something that I just do not understand in any of these phone reviews (Apple or Android).The die shots always show 4x 16-wide LPDDR4 PHYs. OK, so 64-bit wide channel to DRAM, seems reasonable.
Now the fastest normal LPDDR4 is LPDDr4-2133, which in any normal naming scheme would imply 2,133MT/s. So one transaction, 8 bytes wide, gives us guaranteed-not-to-exceed of 17GB/s.
But of course Huawei's Geekbench4 memory bandwidth is ~22GB/s. Maybe Huawei are using slightly faster LPDDr4-2166 or whatever, but the details don't change --- the only way the numbers work out is if the "maximum bandwidth" of the DRAM is actually around 34 GB/s.
Which implies that EITHER
- LPDDR4-2133 does NOT mean 2133MT/sec. (But that's what common sense would suggest, and this recent AnandTech article on DDR5
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13605/sk-hynix-deve... )
OR
- somehow there is 128-bits of width between all the high-end phone SoCs (either 2 independent 64-bit channels [more likely IMHO] or a single 128-bit wide channel).
Can you clarify?
anonomouse - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
It’s 2133MHz IO and it’s DDR, so 4266MT/s. Each LPDDR4 channel is 16 bits. Hence the common listing of LPDDR4X-4266.Usually these are advertised/listed at the MT/s rate so DDR4-2666 has an IO clock of 1333MHz. Main difference being that DDR4 has a 64 bit channel width.
name99 - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
But then look at the article I gave, for DDR5https://www.anandtech.com/show/13605/sk-hynix-deve...
This includes sentences like "The new DDR5 chip from SK Hynix supports a 5200 MT/sec/pin data transfer rate, which is 60% faster than the 3200 MT/s rate officially supported by DDR4."
which strongly implies that a DDR4-3200 is NOT running at 6400 MT/s.
WTF is going on here? Micron lists their LPDDR4, for example, as LPDDR4-2133, NOT as LPDDR4-4266?
N Zaljov - Sunday, November 18, 2018 - link
I fail to see any issues with the current naming convention, apart from being confusing asf."Micron lists their LPDDR4, for example, as LPDDR4-2133, NOT as LPDDR4-4266" - of course they are: https://www.micron.com/parts/dram/mobile-ddr4-sdra...
Although there seems to be a typo in the specs of their partlists, which can be confusing, but they are clearly listing their LPDDR4(x) as LPDDR4-4266 (or, typoed, LPDDR4-4166), with an I/O clk of 2133 MHz and an actual memory clockspeed of around 533,3 MHz (on-demand modulation will keep the clock of the memory arrays somewhere between 533,25 and 533,35, depending on the load).
Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
The DSU's interface is limited at 2x 128bit per ACE interface to the memory subsystem/interconnect (32B/cycle in each direction) times the frequency of the DSU/L3 of which we aren't certain in the Kirin 980, but let's take the S845 which runs at 1478MHz IIRC: ~47GB/s. Plenty enough. We don't know the interconnect bandwidth from the DSU to the memory controller. The memory controllers themselves internally run at a different frequency (usually half) but what matters is talking about the DRAM speed. The Kirin 980/Mate 20's run on LPDDR4X at 2133MHz, or actually 4266MT/s because it's DDR. That's a peak of 4*16*4266/8=34.12GB/s.The actual answer is a lot simpler and more stupid. Geekbench 4's multi-threaded memory test just caps out at 2 threads, so in reality there's only ever two CPUs stressing the memory controller. Beyond this I've been told by some vendors that it doesn't scale in the test itself.
My conclusion: Ignore all the GB4 memory tests.