Huawei Mate 10 review

Chipset - the new Kirin 970

The Kirin 970 chip premiered at IFA a couple of months ago, but this is the first implementation we see. It is manufactured using a high-end 10nm process by Huawei's in-house HiSilicon division and promises faster performance, and great battery-efficiency.

The highlight of the new Kirin 970 isn't the 25% faster CPU or the 4x more powerful GPU, but the brand-new Neural-network processor unit (NPU), which provides hardware acceleration to machine learning tasks. These tasks include image recognition, voice recognition, and natural language processing. Huawei has already trained the chip by showing it millions of images, voice samples, and text, so now it's able to recognize new images, voice and data much faster.

Huawei likes to call the whole process artificial intelligence, but it's not the AI from the sci-fi movies we've all seen, so don't get too excited. And it's not even close to thinking, seeing or learning like a human, despite what the ads might tell you. But it does a lot more than what Apple does with their machine learning chip embedded in the latest A11 Bionic chip, and that's not a bad start.

The new Kirin 970 chipset offers an octa-core processor that should be up to 50% more power efficient than the Kirin 960. The CPU still packs the same 4x2.4 GHz Cortex-A73 & 4x1.8 GHz Cortex-A53 cores, but the two clusters can now work simultaneously to deliver faster multi-threaded performance.

The new GPU in charge of graphics is a 12-core Mali-G72MP12. It should provide 4x performance increase over the 8-core Mali-G71MP8 inside the Kirin 960, while its power efficiency is 8x better than the GPU inside old chip.

Benchmark performance

It's time we put the Kirin 970 through the most popular benchmarks. As usual, the octa-core processor is the first to get our attention. Geekbenching the CPU brought no surprises. A single A73 core is a beast, as powerful as the latest Kryo. It's far from Apple's Monsoon core, but it's at the top of the Android game.

GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 8 Plus
  4232
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  1987
• Samsung Galaxy S8+
  1986
• Xiaomi Mi Mix 2
  1924
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  1902
• LG V30
  1901
• Huawei Mate 10
  1882
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  1862
• Huawei Mate 9
  1859

The eight cores of the Kirin 970 processor do a great job, matching the performance of all current leaders - Snapdragon 835 and Exynos 8895. The six-core A11 by Apple is out of this world, yet again.

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 8 Plus
  10037
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  6784
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  6783
• Samsung Galaxy S8+
  6754
• Huawei Mate 10
  6625
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  6590
• Huawei Mate 9
  6407
• LG V30
  6365
• Xiaomi Mi Mix 2
  6234

The Kirin 970 finally brings a mighty and cutting-edge GPU - Mali-G72MP12, a massive upgrade over the previous generation. Unlike the Mate 9, the 10 has a high-resolution Quad HD screen so its GPU has to be powerful. And the offscreen benchmark tests reveal exactly that - the 12-core Mali-G72 is at least twice as good as the 8-core G71 found in Mate 9, and equal to the Adreno 540 (Snapdragon 835) and the 20-core G71 inside the most recent Galaxies.

Apple's 3-core proprietary GPU is the leader though by another impressive margin.

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 8 Plus
  85
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  65
• Huawei Mate 10
  65
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  63
• LG V30
  60
• Xiaomi Mi Mix 2
  54
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  51
• Samsung Galaxy S8+
  50
• Huawei Mate 9
  30
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  28

GFX 3.1 Car scene (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  25
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  25
• Xiaomi Mi Mix 2
  25
• Samsung Galaxy S8+
  25
• LG V30
  24
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  22
• Huawei Mate 10
  21
• Huawei Mate 9
  13
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  12

The onscreen tests just cement our previous statement - the 12-core Mali G72 is an equal to all modern GPUs found in the Androids right now. The phones running in lower resolution such as the Mate 10 Pro, Mate 9, and Mi Mix 2 score better, of course, due to the less pixels to work with. Apple's GPU easily reaches the 60fps v-sync cap.

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 8 Plus
  59
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  55
• Xiaomi Mi Mix 2
  50
• Huawei Mate 10
  43
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  42
• Samsung Galaxy S8+
  40
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  37
• LG V30
  35
• Huawei Mate 9
  28
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  18

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Xiaomi Mi Mix 2
  24
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  21
• Huawei Mate 9
  14
• Huawei Mate 10
  13
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  13
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  13
• LG V30
  13
• Samsung Galaxy S8+
  13
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  8.2

Finally, the BaseMark X GPU test once again shows the prowess of the new Mali G72 as is the ES 3.1 benchmark.

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S8+
  43862
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  40890
• Huawei Mate 10
  40809
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  40232
• Xiaomi Mi Mix 2
  38349
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  37211
• LG V30
  36704
• Huawei Mate 9
  36519
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  27600

Basemark ES 3.1 / Metal

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 8 Plus
  1644
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  1268
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  1183
• Huawei Mate 10
  1142
• Samsung Galaxy S8+
  1111
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  875
• LG V30
  860
• Huawei Mate 9
  794
• Xiaomi Mi Mix 2
  739
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  616

Moving on to the popular compound benchmarks such as AnTuTu and BaseMark OS, we see the Mate 10 as one very balanced performer on par with the best of the smartphones right now.

AnTuTu 6

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 8 Plus
  188766
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  178510
• Huawei Mate 10
  175426
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  175153
• LG V30
  174330
• Samsung Galaxy S8+
  174070
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  172425
• Xiaomi Mi Mix 2
  160319
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  128719
• Huawei Mate 9
  122826

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 8 Plus
  3601
• Xiaomi Mi Mix 2
  3578
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  3425
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  3424
• Huawei Mate 10
  3415
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  3333
• Samsung Galaxy S8+
  3298
• Huawei Mate 9
  2830
• LG V30
  2705
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  2496

Huawei has finally made a flagship chipset with a competitive performance across the board. All previous Kirins lacked in GPU, but the 970 model has one of the most recent GPUs with all the power you need.

The 10nm manufacturing process makes the Kirin 970 a power-efficient chip, though the large battery surely helped, too. It should have allowed the Mate 10 keep the motherboard temperature rather low under pressure, but unfortunately, that's not the case.

Under continuous load, the Mate 10 gets hot at one particular spot. Unpleasantly hot even. The switch from metal to glass surely hurt the thermal conductivity, but we just didn't expect the Mate 10 to become that hot. Naturally, the chip applies performance throttling to prevent overheating. You will never feel this in real life usage, even when playing power-hungry games, but the benchmark scores fell as much as 50% after the first run, especially the GPU ones.

So, yes, the Mate 10 offers flagship performance and smooth Android experience. It will handle everything well, but it may get unpleasantly hot in long gaming sessions. Performance throttling is fact here, though we guess you won't be able to tell unless it's a benchmark you are running.