Huawei Mate 20 review

The Mate 20 has a Kirin 980 chip

Huawei Mate 20, just like the rest of the Mate 20 family, utilizes HiSicon's latest Kirin 980 chip. This is the first chipset in an Android phone built on the 7nm manufacturing process and it's promising plenty of power and efficiency gains over its predecessor and other 10nm chipsets, including the Snapdragon 845.

The Kirin 980 uses an 8-core CPU design with 2x high-performance Cortex-A76 cores running at 2.6GHz and 2x Cortex-A76 cores clocked at 1.92GHz and 4x power-efficient Cortex-A55 cores that go up to 1.8GHz. The processor makes use of ARM's DynamIQ architecture, which is the evolution of big.LITTLE and allows any subset of cores (or all together) to work simultaneously depending on the workload.

Kirin 980 SoC has a Mali-G76 MP10 (ten-core) GPU, which should offer tremendous performance and efficiency gains compared to its predecessor Mali-G72 in the Kirin 970.

EMUI 9's GPU Turbo 2.0 is supported by six games in total for the time being. It allows all those games to run smoothly and steady at 60 fps at full resolution. GPU Turbo 2.0 is new, but Huawei is also working with game developers to enable it in even more popular games though we won't be holding our breath.

The 7nm manufacturing process isn't the Kirin 980's only claim to fame. The chipset is also the first to support 2133MHz LPDDR4X memory and incorporates a dedicated dual NPU chip. Huawei calls the latter "Dual-Brain Power" and can help recognize up to 4,500 images per minute, which is around 120% faster than last year's single NPU chip on the Kirin 970 SoC.

Finally, the chipset comes with a new Image Signal Processor, which delivers a 46% increase in data throughput and better multi-camera support. It promises an improved HDR color reproduction, Multi-pass noise reduction that removes artifacts without hurting with the image details and better motion tracking.

And now it's time to run some tests.

Benchmarks

Benchmarks scores have been driving the industry for quite some time. Many Chinese makers try to impress with higher and higher (AnTuTu) results, leading to tampering with the phone performance in order to look favorable in the eyes of the users.

At IFA 2018 in Berlin Huawei officials confirmed that the manufacturer is using benchmark detection software to deliver the best possible results, only because its competitors are doing it and it wouldn't want to be at a disadvantage.

Huawei then promised to make this hidden Performance mode available to anyone and now it's live in the new Mate 20 phones. You can find the switch in the Battery settings. Previous Huawei phones are getting this option soon, too.

Huawei claims this mode gives you the full unrestricted power of the Kirin chipset. Sure, it will drain the battery and the phone will get hot, but for whatever reasons you need every bit of speed - you can have it now. There is a catch, though.

Once enabled the performance mode does unlock the full potential, but all safety measures are still in place. And they better be, as the Mate gets hot fast, even before AnTuTu has finished its run, and then...it throttles. And when throttling occurs, you are no longer in full speed.

Long story short - the Mate 20 can offer a small speed boost at some occasions with its Performance Mode, but not for long. To get the optimal scores in this mode we had to put the Mate 20 in a fridge for the whole test run and after it was done the phone was not cold!

The results - well, about 10% boost across all benchmark tests for the first run. Yes, that's it. You can get a sustainable 5% boost from the regular mode over time, while the 10% bump is for the first few minutes only. So, we are not sure if the extra heat and battery drain are worth the hassle.

The Mate 20, performance mode or not, is on top of the whole Android pile, when it comes to multi-core processor performance. You can see the 10% gain from the performance mode quite clearly here.

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 20 (perf.)
  10138
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro (perf.)
  10110
• Huawei Mate 20
  9793
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro
  9712
• Samsung Galaxy Note9
  9026
• OnePlus 6T
  8977
• Sony Xperia XZ3
  8607
• Google Pixel 3 XL
  8088
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  6783
• Huawei P20 Pro
  6679
• Huawei Mate 10
  6625

The single-core result of the Mate 20 CPU comes short of the Mongoose cores of the Galaxy Note9. The performance mode helps a little, but still not quite enough.

GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Note9
  3642
• Huawei Mate 20 (perf.)
  3401
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro (perf.)
  3390
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro
  3291
• Huawei Mate 20
  3284
• Sony Xperia XZ3
  2486
• OnePlus 6T
  2431
• Google Pixel 3 XL
  2363
• Huawei P20 Pro
  1907
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  1902
• Huawei Mate 10
  1882

The Kirin 980 chipset has Mali-G76 10-core GPU in charge of graphics. The performance, while an improvement over the previous Kirin 970, wasn't impressive on the Mate 20 Pro because of the higher 1440p resolution. The Mate 20 on the other hand has a less needy 1080p display and should offer better, if not chart-topping performance.

In terms of sheer power, the Mate 20 is slightly slower than the Snapdragon 845's Adreno GPU. When we enabled the Performance mode though, and the Mate's GPU matches and sometimes even beats the latest Adreno in circulation.

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• OnePlus 6T
  53
• Huawei Mate 20 (perf.)
  51
• Huawei Mate 20
  47
• Huawei P20 Pro
  37
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  35
• Sony Xperia XZ3
  31
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro
  27
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro (perf.)
  27
• Samsung Galaxy Note9
  25
• Google Pixel 3 XL
  24
• Huawei Mate 10
  23

GFX 3.1 Car scene (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 20 (perf.)
  31
• OnePlus 6T
  31
• Huawei Mate 20
  28
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  21
• Huawei P20 Pro
  21
• Sony Xperia XZ3
  19
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro
  17
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro (perf.)
  16
• Samsung Galaxy Note9
  15
• Huawei Mate 10
  13
• Google Pixel 3 XL
  12

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 20 (perf.)
  46149
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro (perf.)
  44780
• OnePlus 6T
  43886
• Sony Xperia XZ3
  43843
• Huawei Mate 20
  43822
• Google Pixel 3 XL
  43073
• Samsung Galaxy Note9
  41994
• Huawei Mate 10
  40809
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro
  40269
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  40232
• Huawei P20 Pro
  39945

The compound benchmarks such as AnTuTu and BaseMark confirm the flagship nature of the new Kirin 980 chipset. If performance mode is enabled, both Mates score 10% higher and come on top of both charts beating the rest of the Android gang.

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 20 (perf.)
  308307
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro (perf.)
  308050
• OnePlus 6T
  293994
• Sony Xperia XZ3
  284555
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro
  273913
• Huawei Mate 20
  273913
• Google Pixel 3 XL
  258244
• Samsung Galaxy Note9
  248823
• Huawei Mate 10
  214037
• Huawei P20 Pro
  209884

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Huawei Mate 20 Pro (perf.)
  4610
• Huawei Mate 20 (perf.)
  4599
• OnePlus 6T
  4452
• Huawei Mate 20
  4093
• Huawei Mate 20 Pro
  3939
• Google Pixel 3 XL
  3895
• Sony Xperia XZ3
  3700
• Huawei Mate 10 Pro
  3425
• Huawei Mate 10
  3415
• Huawei P20 Pro
  3252
• Samsung Galaxy Note9
  3064

Huawei Mate 20 and its Kirin 980 are a worthy flagship pair. The chip offers the fastest processor on the Android market, as usual, while its GPU punch is close to that of the most current Adreno by Qualcomm.

The Kirin 980 is manufactured on the cutting-edge 7nm process, but if you expected it not to heat up - you'd be wrong. The chip does release a reasonable amount of heat and the Mate 20 Pro does have a few spots that get hot when you subject it to a lot of pressure. The phone won't go as hot as the previous Mates though. Some throttling may occur after running consecutive benchmark tests but only then.

The performance mode unlocks the full potential of the Kirin 980, which gave us a 10% boost in benchmark scores - and that is only when we kept the phone cold in the fridge. At room temperature the phone quickly heats up, throttles and you only gets about 5% benefit.

Huawei has delivered an all-around great chip with a class-leading processor and competitive graphics core. It has better thermal control and less throttling than the previous Kirin 970, too, making this arguably the first occasion when the Kirin chipset is actually an advantage for the Huawei rather than a shortcoming.