HiSilicon Kirin 970 - Android SoC Power & Performance Overview
by Andrei Frumusanu on January 22, 2018 9:15 AM ESTToday I would say that there’s only two truly vertically integrated mobile OEMs who have full control over their silicon: Apple and Huawei – and of the two one could say Huawei is currently even more integrated due to in-house modem development. Huawei’s semiconductor division, HiSilicon, has over the last several years been the one company which seems to have managed what the others haven’t: break in into the high-end market with solutions that are competitive with the current leader in the business, Qualcomm.
I remember the Honor 6 with the newly branded (Previously not having any “halo” line-up name) Kirin 920 SoC as the first device with the company’s in-house SoC that we reviewed. These and the following generation the Kirin 930 suffered from immaturity with problems such as a very power hungry memory controller and very disappointing camera processing pipeline (ISP/DSP). The Kirin 950 was in my opinion a turning point for HiSilicon as the product truly impressed and improved the quality of the product, catching many eyes in the semiconductor industry, including myself in the resulting review of the Huawei Mate 8.
Over the last several years we’ve seen great amounts of consolidation in the mobile semiconductor industry. Companies such as Texas Instruments which were once key players no longer offer mobile SoC products in their catalogue. We’ve seen companies such as Nvidia try and repeatedly fail at carving out meaningful market-share. MediaTek has tried providing higher end SoCs with the Helio X line-up with rather little success to the point that the company has put on hold development in that segment to rather focus on higher margin parts in the P-series.
Meanwhile even Samsung LSI, while having a relatively good product with its flagship Exynos series, still has not managed to win over the trust of the conglomorate's own mobile division. Rather than using Exynos as an exclusive keystone component of the Galaxy series, Samsing has instead been dual-sourcing it along with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoCs. It’s therefore not hard to make the claim that producing competitive high-end SoCs and semiconductor components is a really hard business.
Last year’s Kirin 960 was a bit of a mixed bag: the SoC still delivered good improvements over the Kirin 950 however it was limited in terms of what it could achieve against competing flagship SoCs from Samsung and Qualcomm as they both had a process node advantage. Huawei's introduction of flagships with new generation of SoCs in the fourth quarter is more close to the release time-frame of Apple than the usual first quarter that we’ve come accustomed of Qualcomm and Samsung.
As such when pitting the Kirin versus Snapdragon and Exynos’s we’re looking at a product that’s more often than not late to the party in terms of introduction of new technologies such as process node and IP. The Kirin 970 fits this profile: as a 10nm Cortex-A73 generation-based SoC, it lagged behind Qualcomm and Samsung in terms of process node, yet being too early in its release to match up with ARM’s release schedule to be able to adopt DynamiQ and A75 and A55 based CPU cores for this cycle. That being said the Kirin 970 enjoys a few months with technical feature parity with the Snapdragon 835 and Exynos 8895 before we see new Snapdragon 845 and Exynos 9810 products later in the usual spring refresh cycle.
Nevertheless, the article today is a focus on the Kirin 970 and its improvements and also an opportunity to review the current state of SoCs powering Android devices.
HiSilicon High-End Kirin SoC Lineup | |||
SoC | Kirin 970 | Kirin 960 | Kirin 950/955 |
CPU | 4x A73 @ 2.36 GHz 4x A53 @ 1.84 GHz |
4x A73 @ 2.36GHz 4x A53 @ 1.84GHz |
4x A72 @ 2.30/2.52GHz 4x A53 @ 1.81GHz |
GPU | ARM Mali-G72MP12 746 MHz |
ARM Mali-G71MP8 1037MHz |
ARM Mali-T880MP4 900MHz |
LPDDR4 Memory |
4x 16-bit CH LPDDR4 @ 1833 MHz 29.9GB/s |
4x 16-bit CH LPDDR4 @ 1866MHz 29.9GB/s |
2x 32-bit LPDDR4 @ 1333MHz 21.3GB/s |
Interconnect | ARM CCI | ARM CCI-550 | ARM CCI-400 |
Storage I/F | UFS 2.1 | UFS 2.1 | eMMC 5.0 |
ISP/Camera | Dual 14-bit ISP | Dual 14-bit ISP (Improved) |
Dual 14-bit ISP 940MP/s |
Encode/Decode | 2160p60 Decode 2160p30 Encode |
2160p30 HEVC & H.264 Decode & Encode 2160p60 HEVC Decode |
1080p H.264 Decode & Encode 2160p30 HEVC Decode |
Integrated Modem | Kirin 970 Integrated LTE (Category 18/13) DL = 1200 Mbps 5x20MHz CA, 256-QAM UL = 150 Mbps 2x20MHz CA, 64-QAM |
Kirin 960 Integrated LTE (Category 12/13) DL = 600Mbps 4x20MHz CA, 64-QAM UL = 150Mbps 2x20MHz CA, 64-QAM |
Balong Integrated LTE (Category 6) DL = 300Mbps 2x20MHz CA, 64-QAM UL = 50Mbps 1x20MHz CA, 16-QAM |
Sensor Hub | i7 | i6 | i5 |
NPU | Yes | No | No |
Mfc. Process | TSMC 10nm | TSMC 16nm FFC | TSMC 16nm FF+ |
The Kirin 970, isn't a major IP overhaul as it continues to use the same central processing unit IP from ARM that was used in the Kirin 960. The new SoC even doesn't improve the frequency of the CPU clusters as we still see the same 2.36GHz for the A73 cores and 1.84GHz for the A53 cores. When ARM originally launched the A73 we had seen optimistic targets of up to 2.8GHz on TSMC 10nm, but we seem to have largely missed that target, a sign of ever increasing difficulty to scale frequency in mobile SoCs as the diminishing returns from process node updates become worse and worse.
The Kirin 970 does bring a major overhaul and change in the GPU configuration as we see the first implementation of ARM’s Mali G72 in a 12-cluster configuration, a 50% increase in core count over the Kirin 960’s G71-MP8 setup. The new GPU is running at a much reduced frequency of 746MHz versus the 1033MHz of the Kirin 960. In Matt Humrick’s review of the Kirin 960 we saw some disastrous peak average power figures of the Mali G71 outright exploding the thermal envelope of the Mate 9, so hopefully the architectural improvements of the new G72 alongside a wider and lower clocked configuration in conjunction with the new process node will bring significant improvements over its predecessor.
The new modem in the Kirin 970 now implements 3GPP LTE Release 13 and supports downlink speeds of up to 1200Mbps thanks to up to 5x20MHz carrier aggregation with 256-QAM, making the new Kirin modem feature equivalent to Qualcomm’s X20 modem that’ll be integrated in the Snapdragon 845.
The big story surrounding the Kirin 970 was the inclusion of a dedicated neural processing unit. The NPU, as HiSilicon decided to name it, is part of a new type and generation of specialised dedicated acceleration blocks with the aim of offloading “inferencing” of convolutional neural net (CNNs). Many will have heard buzzwords such as artificial intelligence surrounding the topic, but the correct term is machine learning or deep learning. The hardware acceleration blocks with various names from various companies do not actually do any deep learning, but rather are there to improve execution (inferencing) of neural network models while the training of the models will still remain something that will be done either in the cloud or by other blocks in the SoC such as the GPU. It’s still the early days but we’ll have a proper look at the NPU in its dedicated section of the article.
SoC die shot image & labels courtesy of TechInsights Mate 10 teardown
As aforementioned one of the bigger improvements of the Kirin 970 is the switch to a TSMC 10FF manufacturing node. While 10nm is supposed to be a long-lived node for Samsung's foundry – where indeed we’ll see two full generations of SoCs produced on 10LPE and 10LPP – TSMC is taking a different approach and sees its own 10FF process node a short-lived node and stepping-stone to the much anticipated 7FF node, which is to be introduced later in 2018. As such the only TSMC 10FF mobile products to date have been the low-volume MediaTek X30 and Apple 10X in summer and the high-volume Apple A11 and HiSilicon Kirin 970 in Q3-Q4, a 2-3 quarter after Samsung had entered high-volume production of the Snapdragon 835 and Exynos 8895.
HiSilicon’s expectations of the new process node are rather conservative improvement of only 20% in efficiency at the same performance point for the apples-to-apples CPU clusters, below ARM’s earlier predictions of 30%. This rather meagre improvement in power will be likely one of the reasons why HiSilicon decided not to increase the CPU clocks on the Kirin 970, instead focusing on bringing down power usage and lowering the TDP when compared to the Kirin 960.
The SoC does enjoy a healthy die size shrink from 117.72mm² down to 96.72mm² even though the new SoC has 50% more GPU cores as well as new IP blocks such as the NPU. Our colleagues at TechInsights have published a detailed per-block size comparison between the Kirin 960 and Kirin 970 and we see a 30-38% decrease in block size for apples-to-apples IP. The Cortex-A73 quad-core cluster now comes in at only 5.66mm², a metric to keep in mind and in stark contrast to Apple which is investing twice as much silicon area in its dual-core big CPU cluster.
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Ratman6161 - Wednesday, January 24, 2018 - link
Personally I think Samsung is in a great position...wheather you consider them "truly vertically integrated" or not. One thing to remember is that most often, Samsung flagship devices come in two variants. It's mostly in the US where we get the Qualcomm variants while elsewhere tends to get Exynos. The dual source is a great arrangement because every once in a while Qualcomm is going to turn out a something problematic like the Snapdragon 810. When that happens Samsung has the option to use its own which is what they did with the Galaxy S6/Note 5 generation which was Exynos only.Another point is: what do you consider "truly vertically integrated". The story cites Apple and Huewai but they don't actually manufacture their SOC's and neither does Qualcomm. I believe the Kirin SOC's are actually manufactured by TSMC while Apple and Qualcomm SOC's have at various times been actually manufactured in Samsung FABs. As far as I know, Samsung is the only company that even has the capability to design and also manufacture their own SOC. So in a way, you could say that my Samsung Note 5 is about the most vertically integrated phone there is, along with non-US versions of the S7 and S8 generations. In those cases you have a samsung SOC manufactured in a Samsung FAB in a Samsung phone with a Samsung screen etc. Don't make the mistake of thinking the whole world is just like us...they aren't. Also many of the screens for other brands are also of Samsung manufacture so you have to keep in mind that there is a lot more to the device than the SOC
fred666 - Monday, January 22, 2018 - link
Huawei only uses HiSilicon SoCs? Nothing from Qualcomm?Andrei Frumusanu - Monday, January 22, 2018 - link
They've used Qualcomm chip-sets and still do use them in segments they can't fill with their own SoCs.niva - Monday, January 22, 2018 - link
So they still use QC chips, but unlike them, Samsung isn't vertically integrated because they use QC chips.Get out of here.
Dr. Swag - Monday, January 22, 2018 - link
His point is Huawei only uses non-HiSilicon chips in price segments that they do not have SoCs for. Samsung, however, does sometimes use QC silicon even if they have SoCs that can fill that segment (e.g. Samsung uses the Snapdragon 835s even though they have the 8895).I'm not saying that I agree with Andrei's view, but there is a difference.
niva - Tuesday, January 23, 2018 - link
I completely disagree with the assessment that Samsung is somehow not "as vertically integrated" as Huawei. Samsung is not just vertically integrated, it produces components for many other key players in the market. They have reasons why they CHOOSE not to use their SOCs in specific markets and areas. Some of the rationale behind those choices may be questioned, but it's a choice. I too think that the world would be a better place if they actually put their own chip designs into their phones and directly competed against Qualcom. That of course might be the end of Qualcom and a whole lot of other companies... Samsung can easily turn into a monopoly that suffocates the entire market, so it's not just veritcal, but horizontal integration. What Huawei has accomplished in short order is impressive, but isn't Huawei just another branch of the Chinese government at this point? Sure yeah, their country is more vertically integrated. Maybe that's the line to take to justify the statement...levizx - Monday, February 26, 2018 - link
No, it's not INTEGRATED because it doesn't prefer its own over outsourcing. Samsung Mobile department runs separately from its Semiconductor department which act as a contractor no different than Qualcomm.As for Huawei being a branch of the Chinese government, it's as true as Google being part of the US government. Stop spruiking conspiracy theory. I know for a fact their employees almost fully owns the company.
KarlKastor - Thursday, January 25, 2018 - link
Well, that's not true. Huawei choose the Snapdragon 625 in the Nova. Why not use their own Kirin 600 Series? it is the same market segment.Samsung only opts for Snapdragon, where they have no own SoCs: all regions with CDMA2000 Networks.
In all other regions, europe for example, they ship all smartphones frome the J- and A-Series to the S-Series and Note with their Exynos SoCs.
yslee - Tuesday, January 30, 2018 - link
You keep on repeating that line, but where I am we have no CDMA2000 networks and still get Snapdragon Samsungs.levizx - Monday, February 26, 2018 - link
That's also not true, Samsung uses Snapdragon where there's no CDMA2000 as well. Huawei used to use VIA's 55nm CBP8.2D over Snapdragon.Mid-tier is not so indicative compared to higher end devices when it comes to, well everything. They may even outsource the ENTIRE DESIGN to a third party, and still proves nothing in particular. They might have chosen S625 because of supply issues which is completely reasonable. Same can not be applied to Samsung, since there's no such thing as supply issues when it comes to Exynos and Snapdragon.