This week saw the launch of the delayed Huawei Mate 40 Pro, which introduced the latest flagship chipset from Hisilicon along with a lower specced Kirin 9000E which will be used on the Mate 40.

In the UK, we won’t be getting the standard Mate 40, so we don’t need to worry about the Kirin 9000SE too much, but the Kirin 9000 brings some massive improvements from the Kirin 990 5G found on the previous Huawei P40 Pro flagship.

Specification

Similar to the last year’s chipset, HiSilicon has opted to go with a slightly older ARM CPU design, last year they claimed the reason for this was that the A77 couldn’t offer the frequencies achievable by the A76 on the 7nm fabrication process. However, with Qualcomm hitting 3.1Ghz on the single-core of the SD865+, that claims doesn’t appear totally accurate. I expect the reality is that Hisilicon launches its flagship a little too early to successfully implement the current generation CPU.

So with this generation, they move from A76 to A77 but this also comes with a significant improvement in frequencies offering a similar spec to the SD865+ but slightly faster.

Both the Kirin 9000 and Kirin 9000 have identical CPU designs.

It is the GPU where things get interesting, Hisilicon has jumped two generations going from the Mali-G76 to the G78 and then also increased the core count by 50% for the Kirin 9000 with a massive 24-core. The Kirin 9000E doesn’t fall too far behind, with just 2 less cores.

Hisilicon was the first to introduce an AI neural processing unit, and they have continued to push this technology.

The Kirin 9000 has the same 2 big core and 1 small core design of the older Kirin 990 5G but the NPU is based on a new generation. The Kirin 9000E drops one of the bigger cores.

Benchmarks

Some early benchmarks were leaked, but now the Mate 40 Pro has been released to reviewers, we have seen a few proper benchmarks. At the moment there is only data for the Kirin 9000, based on the spec, there shouldn’t be a massive difference with the Kirin 9000E but we will need the benchmarks to prove this.

As I haven’t personally used the Mate 40 Pro I have taken my benchmark data from the GSMArena review.

Antutu

The Antutu results from GSMarena are a little unexpected; they ran the phone in its default mode, but then also the optional performance mode. I normally ignore the performance mode because you won’t ever use it in your daily life.

Running as normal the phone achieves a good, but not a particularly impressive result of 531270 offering just a 6.6% increase over the Huawei P40 Pro running as normal.

However, when they switch it to performance mode, that score increased to 686835, smashing all the results currently listed on Antutu with a 7% performance advantage over the currently most powerful phone on the list, the Asus Rog Phone 3.

In performance mode, the phone achieves a score that’s almost 30% higher than normal, which suggests that there could be some serious throttling going on.

With such a big difference in results, at least we know Huawei isn’t artificially inflating the results when it detects a benchmark running (unlike some other phones).

Geekbench

The Geekbench results are actually disappointing if anything with the multi-core result the Kirin 9000 offers just 11.8% improvement over the Kirin 990 5G on the Huawei P40 Pro.

However, things look a little better when it comes to the single-core, the P40 Pro achieved 748 while the Mate 40 Pro gets 920, offering a 23% performance gain.

3DMark

In 3DMark, we see where HiSilicon have focussed their efforts, the 24-core Mali G78 GPU decimates the competition.

In the Sling Shot Extreme OpenGL test the Mate 40 Pro scores 20% higher than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ on the Asus ROG Phone 3 and 38% higher than the Redmi K30 Ultra using MediaTek’s top of the range chipset.

As far as generational improvements go, the Kirin 9000 offers more than double the performance than the Kirin 990 on the Huawei P40 Pro with a 106% difference. Such a large difference between generations is rarely seen and this result is incredible.

Things are just as impressive with the Sling Shot Extreme Vulcan test being 20% ahead of the SD865+, 37% ahead of the Dimensity 1000+, and ever so slightly under double the performance of the previous generation Kirin 990 5G (98.4%).

Overall

Hisilicon has been the best alternative option to Qualcomm for years, Samsungs efforts are half-hearted, and while Mediatek is improving a lot, they are not quite there yet.

This chipset looks fantastic, while I am sure it will lose out to the next-gen Qualcomm and Samsung chipsets in regards to CPU performance, it is quite possible the  Kirin 9000 will have the best GPU performance in the coming year.

Compared to the previous generation Kirin 990 5G, which still has far more performance than I need, the performance improvements are astronomical.

On the CPU side, you may also see a generic generational improvement with a relatively low multi-core gain in Geekbench but a solid 18% on the single core.

It is the GPU that is outstanding, I am not sure if there has been many chipset launches where there is double the performance offered for something as important as the GPU.

As for the Kirin 9000E, we don’t have any hard benchmarks to show the performance differences, but the spec sheet indicates it is only fractionally cut down from the more expensive Kirin 9000 with 2 less GPU cores and 1 less big core NPU.

Posted by Mighty Gadget Blog: UK Technology News and Reviews