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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name99 - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Please don't treat me like a child; read my comments and treat me accordingly.DDR as a rate (transactions) DOUBLE the clock was only relevant to the transition from SDR to DDR.
What do you think is the difference between DDR and DDR2, or DDDR2 and DDR3, or DDR3 and DDR4?
Part of the problem seems to be that no-one can agree on what "clock" actually refers to.
There are at least two clocks of interest - the internal DRM clock, and the external bus clock.
As far as I can tell:
- DDR doubled the transfer rate over the external bus. (External bus, internal clock the same, just like SDR). Internal clock is ~100..200MHz
- DDR2 runs the external clock at twice the internal clock.
- DDR3 runs the external clock at 4x the internal clock. (still running from ~100 to 266MHz)
- At DDR4 I'm no longer sure (which is part of the whole reason for this confusion).
The obvious assumption is that the external clock is now run at 8x the internal clock; but that does NOT seem to be the case. Rather what's defined as the internal clock is now run twice as fast, so that the internal:external multiplier is still 8x, but the internal clock speeds now range from ~200 to ~400MHz.
Meanwhile, is LPDDR following the same pattern at each generation? I haven't a clue, and can find no useful answer on the internet.
anonomouse - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
I think the discussion of internal/external clock ratios is somewhat orthogonal to your originally posed question: the clock that is being advertised is the IO clock for the LPDDR4 modules, since they're telling you what the peak bandwidth of the module is. Commands are on the same clock but SDR instead of DDR and each command takes multiple cycles. Don't quite see what is so confusing about the 2133MHz clock though, since the way they are describing it is entirely accurate and is no different from previous practices. DDR4-3200 has a 1600MHz IO clock too.Also worth remembering that while pin speed is higher, individual LPDDR4 channels are 16bits vs 64bits, so it's not like the actual bandwidth is necessarily higher. This phone has 4-channels to get 34.1GB/s, which is the same bandwidth you'd get from a 2-channel DDR4-2133 system, but much more feasible to scale up capacity/channels/clocks on DDR4.
frostyfiredude - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
Look, I have no idea where you're going with all the internal clocks and DDR4, DDR3, etc differences so I'm not commenting. But, here are the facts on the Mate 20 Pro:The DRAM - Memory controller interface is clocked at 2133Mhz.
Due to being of the DDR family, 2 bits are transferred per clock.
Together, this mean 4266Mbits/s transfer rate per pin.
Finally its a 64-bit bus, meaning 64 data pins. 273024Mbits/s aggregate bandwidth.
That breaks down to 34.1GB/s.
In standard DIMM form on your favourite PC parts store, this is advertised as DDR4-4266 or PC4-34100.
ternnence - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
closer from ram to cpu core, higher frequency ram could get. HBM is another example.eastcoast_pete - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
@Andrei: thanks for this in-depth review! I wonder how S.LSI takes your pessimistic take on their M4; it seems they have a hard time backing away from their in-house design that doesn't seem to cut it. Also, I appreciate that you're live-updating the review with additional information; I trust reviews that add and update their findings as new data become available much more than the one-and-done style.Question: Did you have a chance to ask Huawei along those lines: "What is your commitment to OS updates, how quickly will you make them available, and for how many years?". Having been burned by Huawei a few years ago (promised OS update never arrived), I am still a bit once burned, twice shy. These devices are pricey, and if Huawei wants to take on Apple at Apple prices, they should mirror Apple's commitment to provide OS updates for several years.
rayhydro - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
I'm using the mate 20 now, and I can confirm it has the same stereo setup as the mate20pro. maybe your unit's top tweeter is faulty ?rayhydro - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
I tested both side by side in the stores, both model's stereo speakers sound pretty much the same or extremely similar to my ears. I opted for mate 20 due to it's smaller notch and headphone jack :Dlucam - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
I still think Mali GPU is a garbage GPULolimaster - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
To put it simply, at the same year, they're 1 year behind.Mali G76 MP10 ~ Adreno 540 (a bit faster on the mali side, maybe)
lucam - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
Adreno is always been better. Still think Imagination has the best solution tho