Huawei Mate 20 brings its Kirin 980 to Geekbench, outclasses competition

01 October 2018
The Huawei Mate 20 and its 7nm Kirin 980 chipset are a blazing combination.

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  • ?
  • Anonymous
  • tDP
  • 01 Oct 2018

Beware of the cheaters. Haters gonna hate, and also a cheaters always do the same.

    • N
    • Nick Tagataka
    • TCn
    • 01 Oct 2018

    Tondern, 01 Oct 2018I like GSMARENA as a mobile news source, I really do. But I... moreNot defending Huawei for what they have done, but calling it "cheated on benchmark" is not the most accurate description of what happened. They rather cheated on the real life usage, where they had to throttle down GPU to keep it cool (often a lot more than necessary). The benchmark do represent what Kirin 970 is fully capable of, thus the limit of its performance, no overclocking involved here. All they need to do is make GPU less power consuming, and that's about it. No more need for decreasing the real world performance.

    Also there are 3 reasons why I think they won't cheat this time around:
    1. All phone companies stopped cheating immediately after they got caught.
    2. Kirin 980's GPU is most likely to be power efficient enough to sustain high frequency, due to newer cores built on newer process node.
    3. All benchmark developers and websites like Anandtech will keep watching over manufacturers who cheated before, so they wouldn't be able to cheat even if they wanted to.

    With that said if they do cheat for the second time, they deserve to be burned in hell. Period.

      • N
      • Nick Tagataka
      • TCn
      • 01 Oct 2018

      Imperator Neubaticus, 01 Oct 2018Of course it's boosted lol. All your cares are unfounded. E... moreOh sure it's going to be boosted, I mean the world second largest manufacturer is stupid enough to make the same mistake twice, right? lol


      Wait for the actual phone to come out, because you might have to take back what you said when Anandtech proves you wrong.

        • N
        • Nick Tagataka
        • TCn
        • 01 Oct 2018

        Abhi Dahiya, 01 Oct 2018Dayum! You are such a baby. Couldn't even reply to the real... more"beats in sustained CPU performance"
        "beats in speed tests"
        You're comparing chipsets which is a full generation apart in both manufacturing node and CPU cores, you know it's obviously not going to be true.

        "Beats in sustained GPU performance"
        Mali-G76 inside Kirin 980 should be theoretically more efficient than current Snapdragon's Adreno 630 if what Huawei said in the official announcement is right(176% more efficient), though I'll wait for Anandtech to release a review on Kirin 980 so that they can confirm their claim. With that said I'm certain it won't be as good as upcoming Snapdragon 855.

        "Huawei boosted benchmark scores of Kirin 970 by upto +100% in certain Benchmarks. That was the extent of cheating"
        Ah, one more mistake you made there. They never "boosted" benchmark results, actually the results from those benchmarks represent the actual top performance of Kirin 970. The problem is that it had extremely power-inefficient GPU which needs to be throttled down to a significant degree to run cool, so they decided to limit GPU frequency in real life usage instead of overclocking only when benchmark apps are run. They won't need to cheat anymore if Kirin 980 is capable to run GPU cool enough(and even if they wanted to cheat again, most likely Anandtech wouldn't allow them to do so, thus the actual possibility that they would do it again is extremely low). I'm pretty darn sure they learned their lesson and believe they wouldn't make this ridiculous mistake twice.

          I do not trust Huawei, for all we know it could be manipulated. They have a history for that and they even accepted it. Anyway, what really matters is real life performance and Huwaei phones perform well (that's what i've heard).

            • ?
            • Anonymous
            • t7x
            • 01 Oct 2018

            Outclasses competition by cheating on benchmark scores as always, typical Chinese brands. Not to mention spies on users, sending your data back to the Chinese government. Avoid Chinese brands like Huawei at all cost.

              • S
              • Sinkler
              • rJK
              • 01 Oct 2018

              I am having honor 8. It's performance is still very good and emui is still very smooth. Sometimes the phone gets heated when playing games for longer period of time but it never lagged. Performance difference between Kirin 970 and 980 is huge. Hence I can easily predict the day to day performance of mate 20 to be superb.

                Walter C. Dornez, 01 Oct 2018Yeah, in most cases, if it ain't close to stock Android, it... moreThis is what happened to my Galaxy Tab S3, after the update to Android 8.0 it slowed a bit to the point that it take several seconds to respond specially when I didn't use it for several hrs or days.

                Sometimes, I get frustrated because I am used to the speed of my Mate 10 pro and other iOS device. Hopefully it will not be affected by much when Android 9 arrives.

                  This is the first 7mm cpu put on an Android, naturally it will be faster than the 10mm 840 ones...
                  We will see how it stands vs S10

                    • ?
                    • Anonymous
                    • IHx
                    • 01 Oct 2018

                    It will be hard to give up my Mate 10 Pro for one of these. My M10 has been the most reliable and stable phones I have ever had.

                      Galaxy Note 9, 01 Oct 2018I have Exynos (S9+), SD (OnePlus6), Kirin 970(Honor 10)...I... moreYeah, in most cases, if it ain't close to stock Android, it's gonna be screwed with an update

                        • D
                        • AnonD-731363
                        • SH3
                        • 01 Oct 2018

                        Well i bet Mate 20 Porsche design will beat even apple.
                        But we will see.
                        I am sure it will be most expensive phone on the market even more expensive than Iphone XS Max.

                          • K
                          • KirinHopeful
                          • 4Hu
                          • 01 Oct 2018

                          54% boost from Kirin 970? I hope it's true (competition drives down prices and offers greater varieties to pick from), but 54% multicore boost at this stage of the game (shrinking to 7nm)?

                          Kirin 970->980 is 54% boost, Kirin 960->970 was 15% boost, and Kirin 950->960 was 7% boost? All ARMv8-A, but 980 did switch to Cortex A76/A55 and DynamIQ, so maybe that'll give it a boost... The frequencies for CPU and RAM don't look 54% faster though... :) cross your fingers

                            • O
                            • O S
                            • Nu7
                            • 01 Oct 2018

                            Whackcar, 01 Oct 2018I don't dislike Snapdragon. I'm just not happy with their s... moreSnapdragon's Achilles is its small L2 and L3 caches.

                              Shui8, 01 Oct 2018Woahhh good. Huawei step up their game, hugely. Manipulati... morePerformance especially. Previously I didn't use my father's HUAWEI P10 PLUS for long, 3-5 days of use and it's time to hand it to my father as his daily driver, after I setup everything for him and spend the remaining days using it. Through my few days of usage with the phone, I'm in fact very satisfied with it, I can even recommend such an old phone to my friends if they're looking for one as of now. I'm categorizing this as a 2016 smartphone, because of its equivalent performance as the SNAPDRAGON 820 and the EXYNOS 8890, and it's neck and neck with the EXYNOS 8890 in terms of how long it can sustain, especially hours of intensive stuff like gaming on it. I'm very impressed by how long it can sustain before throttling as compared to SNAPDRAGON 820 smartphones, like my XPERIA X PERFORMANCE, XPERIA XZ, and XPERIA XZs, where gaming for more than 30mins u would see performance drops and slight lags in a game. Heck, even a bump in the graphics like in Mobile Legends to the max still performed out smoothly, whereas my SNAPDRAGON 820 when I set to Medium (Which is the 2nd graphics setting if I'm not wrong, there's 3 settings, with a 60fps unlock framerate) it fails to deliver when compared to the KIRIN 960. At first I thought the bloat-looking EMUI would affect the performance, in fact it does not; it feels snappy and fast. I'm very sure current HUAWEI MATE 10/ HUAWEI MATE 10 PRO users are also experiencing the same thing (Oh yeah HONOR users too). Of course, this comes down to if they can accept the fact that HUAWEI is collecting data excessively, most people wouldn't care benchmark scores too, if it's as fast as the current phones (Not referring to the HUAWEI P10 PLUS), why bother about those cheating benchmarks?

                                • ?
                                • Anonymous
                                • vV5
                                • 01 Oct 2018

                                I hve both p20 n op6... the camera on p20 is super impressive.. But it not as fast as my op6

                                  I like Snapdragon, and even in SD626 i am contented. (vivo V9)
                                  I have a Huawei P10 and it is my first ever flagship, and up until now, for almost 2 years with it, I still love it.
                                  I am definitely sure, this will be my next flagship.

                                  I still wonder how good user experience is in Axx chips, and I guess I will never experience it since they are so EXPENSIVE.

                                    • O
                                    • O S
                                    • Nu7
                                    • 01 Oct 2018

                                    Whackcar, 01 Oct 2018Now there will be a bunch of angry comments from jealous Sn... moreThe multi-core score could have been better (maybe even beat Apple A12) if Huawei had used four ARM Cortex A76 instead of two A76 and two A75.

                                      I have Exynos (S9+), SD (OnePlus6), Kirin 970(Honor 10)...I don't see any difference between any of them in real world performance. May be OnePlus 6 may seem performing faster, probably due to 8 GB RAM while others have 6 GB RAM.

                                      All flagships will run without problems in Android for 2.5 years. Only major OS upgrade can kill it's performance, probably deliberately.

                                        • ?
                                        • Anonymous
                                        • TSQ
                                        • 01 Oct 2018

                                        More importantly at least it's fairly certain that you can charge a Huawei phone's battery properly. That alone is money well spent. /xtravaganza