Huawei P9 benchmarked, Kirin 955 put to the test

The Huawei P9 is powered by an in-house Kirin 955 chipset. Not a full 10 more than the Kirin 950 inside the Mate 8, the designation leads you to believe than not much is changed, and that's indeed the case.

The Kirin 955 SoC features an octa-core CPU with four Cortex-A72 cores clocked at up to 2.5GHz (compared to the 2.3GHz of the Kirin 950's), and four Cortex-A53 cores ticking at up to 1.8GHz (same as Kirin 950). The GPU is again a quad-core Mali-T880 MP4.

We ran a few benchmarks on the P9 and the results are in. Oddly enough, the Kirin 955 trails behind the 950 in multi-core CPU performance, as gauged by GeekBench. Where the Mate 8 benches on par with the Galaxy S7, the P9 is a few hundred points behind. That is probably explained by the yet-to-be-finalized software on the review units. We would have also suspected thermal throttling, but the unit remained cool through the test.

GeekBench 3 (multi-core)

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S7
  6360
• Huawei Mate 8
  6323
• Huawei P9
  6071
• LG G5
  5362
• Samsung Galaxy S6
  5215
• Apple iPhone 6s
  4427
• Sony Xperia Z5
  4017
• LG G4
  3509
• Huawei P8
  3380

Single-core performance is good but not up to the current flagships' standard. There's not much of an improvement over the Mate 8 either, but it's not like a 9% increase in maximum clock rate was ever going to do miracles.

GeekBench 3 (single-core)

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 6s
  2542
• LG G5
  2328
• Samsung Galaxy S7
  2170
• Huawei P9
  1699
• Huawei Mate 8
  1666

In Basemark OS II 2.0, the P9 posted a virtually identical result to the Mate 8. Last year's flagships are no match for Huawei's 2016 top model, while the G5 and its Snapdragon 820 are very slightly ahead. The Exynos 8890 Galaxy S7 is another notch up, within an inch of the iPhone 6s.

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

• Apple iPhone 6s
  2195
• Samsung Galaxy S7
  2128
• LG G5
  2065
• Huawei P9
  2019
• Huawei Mate 8
  2017
• Samsung Galaxy S6
  1674
• LG G4
  1584
• Sony Xperia Z5
  1482
• Huawei P8
  1112

It's the graphics department where Kirins are often not quite up to par, and seeings as how nothing's changed over the Mate 8 in this respect, benchmark results are very much the same. The P9 is capable of 10fps in GFXBench 3.1 Manhattan in the offscreen test, same as the Mate 8.

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

• LG G5
  30
• Samsung Galaxy S7
  28
• Sony Xperia Z5
  18
• Huawei P9
  10
• Huawei Mate 8
  10
• Huawei P8
  3.4

Both also yield a frame a second more when the test is carried out live on the display, and not just rendered in the background. However, the LG G5 and Galaxy S7 can push through onscreen Manhattan at 15fps, despite having to render 78% more pixels, which makers the P9's result all the more unimpressive.

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

• Sony Xperia Z5
  19
• Samsung Galaxy S7
  15
• LG G5
  15
• Huawei P9
  11
• Huawei Mate 8
  11
• Huawei P8
  4.3

In Basemark X the P9 scores close to 17K points, about a 9% bump compared to the Mate 8. While the improvement is welcome, the the results is nowhere near the best in the business, the Galaxy S7 being capable of nearly twice that. Even last year's Xperia Z5 with a Snapdragon 810 posts substantially better figures.

Basemark X

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy S7
  32345
• LG G5
  29456
• Samsung Galaxy S6
  27169
• Sony Xperia Z5
  23923
• Huawei P9
  16942
• Huawei Mate 8
  15593
• LG G4
  15090
• Huawei P8
  6307

To sum it all up, the Kirin 955 brings a marginal improvement in performance over the Mate 8's Kirin 950 and not necessarily in every respect. The flagship chips from Qualcomm and Samsung will remain undisturbed at the top for the time being.