Huawei P9 lite review: On a diet

Performance

The Huawei P9 lite is powered by a HiSilicon chipset, a Kirin 650. It's similar to the Kirin 955 in the flagship P9, though with more modest resources.

The processor is octa-core, but it's eight Cortex-A53 cores while in the 955 chipset half of the cores are faster A57s. Also, the GPU is a Mali-T830 - similar to the T880 in the Kirin 955, but with only half the cores and at a lower clock speed to boot.

You can have a P9 lite with 3GB of RAM, same as the base P9. However, you start at 2GB, so you need to pay extra to match the flagship (and there's no 4GB option either).

Considering that many of the competitors still use a Snapdragon 615 (616/617), which also uses eight A53 cores and an entry-level Adreno GPU, the P9 is looking good.

The exceptions to that are the Nexus 5X and the Xiaomi Mi 4s, which use Snapdragon 808 - an older, but higher-end chipset.

While the Huawei P9 lite can't match the flagship P9 in performance (and no one expected it to), it's very competitive in its price range. It mostly beats the S615 phones (though the HTC One A9 comes close) and shows an overall performance similar to the S808 ones.

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Huawei P9
  2068
• LG Nexus 5X
  1591
• Xiaomi Mi 4s
  1545
• Huawei P9 lite
  1242
• HTC One A9
  944
• Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus
  884
• Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016)
  833
• Oppo R7 (retail)
  757

AnTuTu 6

Higher is better

• Huawei P9
  98069
• HTC One A9
  60324
• Xiaomi Mi 4s
  59850
• Huawei P9 lite
  52768
• Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016)
  35689
• Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus
  35291

Multicore performance is excellent, beating even the Nexus 5X. The S808 chipset replaces four of the A53 cores with two A57s, but their combined force is about equal.

Of course, the A57 is faster than the A53 so the single-thread score goes in favor of the Nexus and Xiaomi. The flagship P9 uses Cortex-A72 cores (the successor to A57) is even faster and there's four of them, which really makes an impact on multi-core performance.

GeekBench 3 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Huawei P9
  6558
• Huawei P9 lite
  3799
• LG Nexus 5X
  3527
• HTC One A9
  3209
• Xiaomi Mi 4s
  3147
• Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016)
  3061
• Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus
  3038
• Oppo R7 (retail)
  2683

GeekBench 3 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Huawei P9
  1819
• Xiaomi Mi 4s
  1254
• Huawei P9 lite
  899
• Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus
  689

The Huawei P9 and P9 lite both use 1080p screens, but the Lite model has only half of the GPU cores. Looking at the results, the difference in clock speed doesn't have that much of an impact.

The Kirin 650 with Mali-T880MP2 has an edge over the Adreno 405 crowd. Qualcomm has moved the Adreno 5xx GPUs, but such Snapdragons are rare in 5" segment (and those are usually expensive).

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Huawei P9
  18
• LG Nexus 5X
  16
• Xiaomi Mi 4s
  13
• Huawei P9 lite
  7.8
• HTC One A9
  6.4
• Oppo R7 (retail)
  5.9
• Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016)
  5.7
• Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus
  5.5

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Huawei P9
  19
• LG Nexus 5X
  17
• Xiaomi Mi 4s
  12
• Huawei P9 lite
  8.3
• HTC One A9
  6.7
• Oppo R7 (retail)
  5.9
• Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016)
  5.7
• Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus
  5.5

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• LG Nexus 5X
  11
• Huawei P9
  10
• Xiaomi Mi 4s
  8.1
• Huawei P9 lite
  4.6
• HTC One A9
  3.8

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• LG Nexus 5X
  11
• Huawei P9
  11
• Xiaomi Mi 4s
  7.9
• Huawei P9 lite
  4.9
• HTC One A9
  4

Basemark X confirms the findings from GFX Bench - games will run slightly better on the P9 lite than on most similarly priced phones, except the few that went with the Snapdragon 808 (which has a premium GPU).

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Huawei P9
  16942
• LG Nexus 5X
  16609
• Xiaomi Mi 4s
  12990
• Huawei P9 lite
  7681
• HTC One A9
  6617
• Oppo R7 (retail)
  5382
• Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016)
  4947
• Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus
  4863

Basemark X (medium)

Higher is better

• Huawei P9
  29583
• Xiaomi Mi 4s
  19854
• Huawei P9 lite
  15754
• HTC One A9
  12250

We've been testing a Huawei P9 lite with 2GB of RAM. It's fairly snappy, but heavier apps sometimes need a moment when you switch into or away from them. Once loaded, the apps would usually run just fine.