Check out our first Huawei P20 Pro benchmark results

The Huawei P20 and P20 Pro debuted yesterday and their Leica cameras were understandably met with a lot of excitement. Performance wasn't so much in focus as the Kirin 970 that powers them was introduced back in October with the Mate 10 series.

Still, we though to give the SoC a test to see how it fares on the new taller screens of slightly higher resolution.

The Kirin 970 premiered at IFA last fall. It is built on the 10 nm process by HiSilicion, native Huawei division. The chip is housing an octa-core CPU - four Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.4 GHz for performance and four Cortex-A53 at 1.8 GHz for power efficiency. The GPU onboard is Mali-G72 MP12, while the RAM on the P20 Pro that we used for the test is 6 GB.

Looking at the benchmark results, the Huawei P20 Pro sits quietly in the lower bottom of the list, which for this purpose, includes only devices with the latest chips from Exynos, Qualcomm and HiSilicon. Keep in mind that the P20 Pro is still not officially on sale so once its software is finalized the gap to the leaders will probably be a bit smaller.

The CPU differences between the latest Exynos 9810 and Qualcomm 845 and the 6-months old Kirin 970 in the CPU tests are more pronounced, but the compound tests came out pretty close.

That would suggest that while no longer the most powerful around the Huawei chip has aged well and the P20 duo is not likely to find itself out of its depth no matter how hard a task you will throw at it. Still, benchmarks are one thing and real life performance is often another, so we'll reserve any verdicts for when the reviews are complete.

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  8883
• Samsung Galaxy S9
  8830
• Sony Xperia XZ2
  8466
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  6783
• Huawei P20 Pro
  6679
• Huawei Mate 10
  6625

GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  3771
• Samsung Galaxy S9
  3759
• Sony Xperia XZ2
  2454
• Huawei P20 Pro
  1907
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  1902
• Huawei Mate 10
  1882

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia XZ2
  259244
• Samsung Galaxy S9
  250156
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  246660
• Huawei Mate 10
  214037
• Huawei P20 Pro
  209884

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia XZ2
  3859
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  3425
• Huawei Mate 10
  3415
• Samsung Galaxy S9
  3382
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  3354
• Huawei P20 Pro
  3252

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia XZ2
  82
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  74
• Samsung Galaxy S9
  73
• Huawei P20 Pro
  66
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  65
• Huawei Mate 10
  65

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia XZ2
  59
• Huawei P20 Pro
  55
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  55
• Samsung Galaxy S9
  45
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  45
• Huawei Mate 10
  43

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia XZ2
  55
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  47
• Samsung Galaxy S9
  46
• Huawei P20 Pro
  40
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  38
• Huawei Mate 10
  38

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia XZ2
  51
• Huawei P20 Pro
  37
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  35
• Samsung Galaxy S9
  24
• Samsung Galaxy S9+
  24
• Huawei Mate 10
  23