When it comes to high-end SoC of mobile phones, we believe that the first names that come to mind are Snapdragon 801, Exynos 5422, Tegra K1, etc. The Hisense processor under Huawei has always given the impression that its performance is not enough. From the new Kirin 920 released by Huawei on June 6, we can see Huawei's determination and strength to attack the high-end SoC market. What's special about this eight core processor?
Let's take a look at some features of the Kirin 920 based on the on-site explanation of Huawei's press conference held in Beijing on June 6. The picture is taken by Baidu WP7
At the press conference, we first reviewed the development history of Hisense Series SoC. Of course, the most familiar one was K3V2, which had a long life cycle. At that time, because the same frequency performance and manufacturing process were behind the competitors, and GPU performance and compatibility problems also troubled many users. Finally, in 2014, Huawei welcomed the Kirin 910 and Kirin 920 series processors ▼
The Kirin 910 and Kirin 910T are shown first. Although the quad core A9r4, Mali450MP4, LTE Cat4 baseband and other parameters seem to meet the needs of mainstream users. However, since the Kirin 910 series uses a single channel 32bit LPDDR3-1600 memory, the bandwidth of 6.4 GB/s is also insufficient to cope with 1080P resolution. For example, X1 and P7 products are obviously not as easy to operate as the high bandwidth SoC. ▼
Next is the introduction of Kirin 920 series, which supports big Kirin 920 of LITTLE and HMP technology, quad core Cortex-A15 and quad core Cortex-A7 can work simultaneously ▼
The following figure shows the advantages of HMP very well. In many use scenarios, only one Cortex-A15 core is enabled, and 2 to 3 Cortex-A7 cores are deployed. It can be seen here that in 3D large-scale games, photography and other scenes, even three Cortex-A15 cores need to be opened to meet the requirements ▼
The working mode of Exynos 5422, which also supports HMP technology in the market, is much simpler. The quad core Cortex-A15 is open for a long time, and the lowest frequency is 800MHz. It works with Cortex-A7 cores of different frequencies. This configuration is not as flexible as the Kirin 920 series. The figure below shows that Exynos 5422 is also "eight core fully open" ▼
Another advantage of Kirin 920 is its high integration. In addition to LTE Cat6 baseband, it also has built-in DSP, sensorhub ▼
Kirin 920 has achieved 20% improvement in energy efficiency ratio over the standard Cortex-A15 through the 28hpm process designed by itself ▼
Kirin 920 uses GTS technology to realize the actual use of military tracking to call the working status of eight physical cores ▼
Dual core and dual channel ISPs are used. Of course, competitors such as Exynos 5422 and Snapdragon 801 all use ISPs of the same level with stronger processing performance. Compared with competitors' support for 4K video recording, Kirin 920 only supports "2.5K" (i.e., 2560 * 1440) resolution video recording, which also shows the gap in ISP performance ▼
In terms of GPU, Kirin 920 uses ARM's Mali-T628MP4 with a frequency of 600MHz. We know that Exynos 5420 uses Mali-T628MP6 with a frequency of 533MHz. Therefore, in theory, Kirin 920's graphics processing performance is not as good as Exynos 5420's, and the gap between Kirin 920 and Snapdragon 801 is even greater. However, compared with the Mali450MP4 of Kirin 910, the performance of Mali-T628MP4 has been greatly improved, and it supports new technologies such as OpenGL ES3.0 ▼
In terms of video decoding, Kirin 920 supports 4K and H.265 hardware decoding, which is a big advantage over competitors ▼
Built in sensor hub, Kirin 920 has also integrated this part of the functions compared with the external chips of competitors, which can further reduce the number of chips in the phone and save the body space ▼
Kirin 920 has built in the most advanced LTE Cat6 baseband at present, bringing the maximum downlink speed of 300Mbps, which is twice faster than the LTE Cat4 baseband built in Snapdragon 801 ▼
Finally, let's review the advantages and disadvantages of Kirin 920 compared with Exynos 5422, Snapdragon 801 and other products
Advantages:
- True eight core processor, supporting GTS technology, can flexibly deploy different cores to work together
- 4K and H.265 hardware decoding
- Built in LTE Cat6 baseband, downlink speed up to 300Mbps
- High integration, integrating sensor hub and audio DSP
- Compared with the public version of Cortex-A15, the energy efficiency ratio increases by 20%
inferiority:
- GPU performance still lags behind competitors
- Dual channel ISP is adopted, but the performance is still not strong enough to support 4K video recording
From the above point of view, the Kirin 920 is indeed a sincere SoC. For our daily use, in addition to the weak GPU performance, all other aspects of the Kirin 920 reflect the excellent characteristics of the Kirin 920, and also show Huawei's strength in SoC research and development. The comprehensive strength of Kirin 920 can really compare with the outstanding products on the market such as Exynos 5422 and Snapdragon 801. As for the actual performance of the product, I believe we can find the answer at the chip conference on June 24.
