The Hisilicon Kirin 985 has been leaked multiple times now with the most recent claiming it will be on the Honor 30. This ended up trying and the standard Honor 30 is the first phone to feature it.

I have already covered how it compared to the Kirin 820 sitting below it, and the Kirin 990 5G sitting above it. The Kirin 990 5G is featured inside the other two Honor 30 phones, as well as the Huawei P40 series.

The base price for the 6/128GB model is CNY 2,999 (£339). For comparison, the Chinese OPPO Reno3 Pro launched at CNY 3,999 (£438) and the Realme X50 5G for CNY 2,499 (£273).

This, therefore, put the Honor 30 with the Kirin 985 right in the middle of two Snapdragon 765G phones.

So how do the two chipsets compare?

Software

As always now with my Huawei/Honor posts, Google gets mentioned. If it is a Huawei/Honor device, it won’t have Google but be based on AOSP and Huawei Mobile Services.

Not an issue for Chinese users who don’t have Google anyway, but HMS is still a work in progress for western users, missing many of the apps we like. Huawei is working hard to improve it, and over time I hope it reaches parity with Google.

In the meantime, you can copy over your existing none Google apps with Phone Clone, what you cant get on App Gallery you can get on APKPure, and you can install Google services on a Huawei/Honor device through some trickery.

CPU

The CPU specification is identical to what was previously leaked adopting a 1x3x4 design with:

• 1x A76 @ 2.58GHz
• 3x A76  @ 2.40GHz
• 4x A55 @ 1.84GHz

In comparison, the Qualcomm has:

• 1x Kryo 475 Prime (CA76)@ 2.4GHz
• 1x Kryo 475 Gold (CA76) @ 2.2GHz
• 6x Kryo 475 Silver (CA55) @ 1.8GHz

So the Huawei/Hisilicon chipset is at a significant advantage already with four A76 cores vs two.

GPU

What wasn’t revealed previously is the GPU specification. We now know this is a 8-core Mali-G77 GPU, as in the Kirin 990.

Qualcomm have their own Adreno 620 which claims to offer a 38% increase in performance from the Snapdragon 730G

Connectivity

Both chipsets feature an integrated 5G modem and the Kirin 985’s maximum downlink speed is 1277 Mbps, and uplink speed is 173 Mbps. 

Other Features

The chipset then uses a dual-core NPU AI chip which should be the same as the Kirin 990 4G and a ISP 5.0 display chip.

Antutu Benchmarks

With the launch of the Honor 30, some early benchmarks have been done giving us an idea of the performance.

It actually doesn’t benchmark too much higher than the lower specced Kirin 820, but it does comfortably outperform the Snapdragragon 765G by a considerable margin.

In the above Antutu tests, this gives the Kirin 985 a 19% advantage over the SD765G but just 2.9% ahead of the Kirin 820 then -2.9% behind last years Kirin 980.

Overall this looks like a superb upper-mid range chipset that will blur the boundaries between flagship even more than we have already seen in the last few years.