Huawei Mate 10 Pro review

Chipset - the new Kirin 970

The Kirin 970 chip premiered at IFA a couple of months ago, and the Mate 10 family is where it makes its actual sensor. 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 faster CPU or 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 25% 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
• Nokia 8
  1925
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  1902
• LG V30
  1901
• Huawei Mate 10
  1882
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  1862
• Huawei Mate 9
  1859
• Sony Xperia XZ1
  1840

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 untouchable, yet again.

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 8 Plus
  10037
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  6784
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  6783
• Huawei Mate 10
  6625
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  6590
• Nokia 8
  6568
• Sony Xperia XZ1
  6541
• Huawei Mate 9
  6407
• LG V30
  6365

The Kirin 970 finally brings a mighty and cutting-edge GPU - Mali-G72MP12, a massive upgrade over the previous generation. Unlike the Mate 10, the 10 Pro has a lower-res 1080p screen (it's actually 1080 x 2160) so its GPU performance has to be better than any other Mate so far. And the benchmark tests reveal exactly - the Mate 10 Pro is beating all Android smartphones but the Xperia XZ1 when it comes to onscreen graphics.

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia XZ1
  40
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  35
• Huawei Mate 9
  23
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  23
• Huawei Mate 10
  23
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  20
• LG V30
  19
• Nokia 8
  18
• Meizu Pro 7 Plus
  13
• Huawei P10 Plus
  12
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  12

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia XZ1
  25
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  21
• Huawei Mate 9
  14
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  13
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  13
• Huawei Mate 10
  13
• LG V30
  13
• Nokia 8
  12
• Huawei P10 Plus
  9
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  8.2
• Meizu Pro 7 Plus
  4.8

The offscreen tests can reveal the true power of the 12-core Mali-G72. It turned out a lot faster than the 8-core G71 found in Mate 9, and equal to the Adreno 540 (Snapdragon 835) and not that far from the 20-core G71 inside the most recent Galaxies.

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  43
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  42
• LG V30
  41
• Sony Xperia XZ1
  39
• Nokia 8
  39
• Huawei Mate 10
  38
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  38
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  22
• Huawei Mate 9
  22
• Meizu Pro 7 Plus
  22
• Huawei P10 Plus
  19

GFX 3.1 Car scene (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• Nokia 8
  32
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  25
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  25
• Sony Xperia XZ1
  24
• LG V30
  24
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  22
• Huawei Mate 10
  21
• Huawei Mate 9
  13
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  12
• Huawei P10 Plus
  12
• Meizu Pro 7 Plus
  8.4

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  40890
• Huawei Mate 10
  40809
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  40232
• Sony Xperia XZ1
  38583
• Nokia 8
  37593
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  37211
• LG V30
  36704
• Huawei Mate 9
  36519
• Huawei P10 Plus
  30602
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  27600
• Meizu Pro 7 Plus
  22472

Finally, the BaseMark ES 3.1 GPU test once again shows that the new Mali G72 is nicely powerful.

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 Note8 (SD 835)
  875
• LG V30
  860
• Nokia 8
  855
• Sony Xperia XZ1
  853
• Huawei Mate 9
  794
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  616
• Meizu Pro 7 Plus
  517

Moving on to the popular compound benchmarks such as AnTuTu and BaseMark OS, we see the Mate 10 Pro 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
• Nokia 8
  175872
• Huawei Mate 10
  175426
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  175153
• LG V30
  174330
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  172425
• Sony Xperia XZ1
  144462
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  128719
• Meizu Pro 7 Plus
  128498
• Huawei P10 Plus
  126252
• Huawei Mate 9
  122826

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 8 Plus
  3601
• Nokia 8
  3503
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  3425
• Samsung Galaxy Note8 (SD 835)
  3424
• Huawei Mate 10
  3415
• Samsung Galaxy Note8
  3333
• Sony Xperia XZ1
  2986
• Huawei P10 Plus
  2940
• Huawei Mate 9
  2830
• LG V30
  2705
• Huawei Mate 9 Pro
  2496
• Meizu Pro 7 Plus
  2380

Huawei has finally made a flagship chipset with a competitive performance across the board. Previous Kirins were doing well with the CPUs, but lagged in the GPU department. Now, 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 also allowed the Mate 10 Pro to keep the motherboard temperature rather low under pressure, but unfortunately, that's not the case.

Under continuous load, the Mate 10 Pro, just like 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 and 10 Pro to become that hot. Naturally, the chip applies performance throttling to prevent overheating. You will very rarely 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 Pro offers flagship performance and smooth Android experience. It will handle everything well, but it may get unpleasantly hot in long gaming sessions.