78

Points
Hisilicon Kirin 970
Overview - A15 Bionic Chip Vs Kirin 970

We have created a comprehensive comparison of the recently released A15 Bionic Chip vs Kirin 970 SoCs by Apple and Hisilicon respectively. We've now weighed the advantages and disadvantages of these 6-core and 8-core CPUs on the basis of their Geekbench, Antutu and 3DMark benchmarks with their technical specifications.

Features

Review

CPU Performance
Single and multi-core processor tests
A15 Bionic Chip 55
Kirin 970 15
Gaming Performance
GPU performance in games and OpenCL/Vulcan
A15 Bionic Chip 56
Kirin 970 12
Battery Life
Efficiency of battery consumption
A15 Bionic Chip 82
Kirin 970 64
Tenzys Tech Score
Overall chip score
A15 Bionic Chip 64
Kirin 970 30
Benchmarks

AnTuTu 9

A15 Bionic Chip Kirin 970
CPU 209204 77046
GPU 351594 90560
Memory 118044 66398
UX 130276 59977
Total score 809118 293981
AnTuTu results from iOS and Android are not directly comparable! They won't affect Tenzys Tech scores.
Key Differences

Pros of Apple A15 Bionic Chip

  • A15 Bionic Chip has 36.86% higher CPU clock speed than Kirin 970 (3230 vs 2360 MHz).
  • A15 Bionic Chip has 41.18% higher GPU clock speed than Kirin 970 (1200 vs 850 MHz).
  • A15 Bionic Chip has 128.62% higher memory frequency than Kirin 970 (4266 vs 1866 MHz).
  • A15 Bionic Chip has 50% smaller sized transistor than Kirin 970 (5 vs 10 nm).
  • A15 Bionic Chip has 175.23% better AnTuTu 9 score than Kirin 970 (809 K vs 294 K).
  • A15 Bionic Chip has latest instruction set, hence better than Kirin 970.
  • A15 Bionic Chip Support 14.43% higher memory bandwidth than Kirin 970 (34.1 vs 29.8 MHz).
Benchmarks

GeekBench 5

Single-Core Score

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A15 Bionic Chip 1743
Kirin 970 390

Multi-Core Score

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A15 Bionic Chip 4844
Kirin 970 1361

Image compression

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A15 Bionic Chip 224.8
Kirin 970 76.9

Face detection

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A15 Bionic Chip 43.1
Kirin 970 14

Speech recognition

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A15 Bionic Chip 136.1
Kirin 970 24.5

Machine learning

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A15 Bionic Chip 104.9
Kirin 970 21.8

Camera shooting

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A15 Bionic Chip 49.3
Kirin 970 11.4

HTML 5

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A15 Bionic Chip 5.64
Kirin 970 1.46

SQLite

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A15 Bionic Chip 1270
Kirin 970 417.7

3DMark

Stability 82%

Graphics test 56 FPS
Stability 80%

Graphics test 6 FPS
Full list of technical specifications

Display

  • Max On-Device Display - 4K @ 60 Hz
  • Max On-Display Resolution 2732 x 2048 3840 x 2160
  • Max External Display - -
  • HDR - HDR, HDR-10
  • Color Depth - -
  • Color Gamut - -
Full list of technical specifications

CPU

85%
Turbo Clock Speed

3230 MHz

62%
Turbo Clock Speed

2360 MHz

92%
Base Frequency

2020 MHz

84%
Base Frequency

1840 MHz

  • Architecture 2x 3.23 GHz – Avalanche
    4x 2.02 GHz – Blizzard
    4x 2.36 GHz – Cortex A73
    4x 1.84 GHz – Cortex A53
  • Cores 6 8
  • Instruction set ARMv8.5-A ARMv8-A
  • L1 cache 256 KB -
  • L2 cache 32 MB 0.5 MB
  • L3 cache - 2 MB
  • Process 5 nm 10 nm
  • Transistor count 15 Billion 5.5 Billion
  • TDP 6 W 9 W
Full list of technical specifications

Graphics

  • GPU name Apple GPU Mali G72 MP12
  • Architecture - Bifrost
  • GPU frequency 1200 MHz 850 MHz
  • Execution units 5 12
  • Shading units 640 192
  • FLOPS - 347 Gigaflops
  • Vulkan version - 1.0
  • OpenCL version - 2.0
  • DirectX version - 12
Full list of technical specifications

Memory

  • Memory frequency 4266 MHz 1866 MHz
  • Max bandwidth 34.1 Gbit/s 29.8 Gbit/s
  • Max Size 6 GB 8 GB
  • Memory type LPDDR4X LPDDR4X
  • Bus 4x 16 Bit 4x 16 Bit
Full list of technical specifications

Multimedia (ISP)

  • Neural processor (NPU) Neural Engine Dedicated NPU
  • Storage type NVMe UFS 2.1
  • Max display resolution 2732 x 2048 3840 x 2160
  • Max camera resolution 1x 48MP, 2x 20MP
  • Video capture 4K at 60FPS 4K at 30FPS
  • Video playback 4K at 60FPS 4K at 60FPS
  • Video codecs H.264, H.265, VP8, VP9, Motion JPEG H.264, H.265, VP8, VP9, VC-1
  • Audio codecs AAC, AIFF, CAF, MP3, MP4, WAV, AC-3, E-AC-3, AAX, AAX+ 32 bit@384 kHz, HD-audio
Full list of technical specifications

Connectivity

  • Modem - -
  • 4G support LTE Cat. 24 LTE Cat. 18
  • 5G support Yes No
  • Wi-Fi 6 5
  • Bluetooth 5.0 4.2
  • Navigation GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo, QZSS GPS, GLONASS, Beidou, Galileo
Full list of technical specifications

Info

Review

Review By TenzysTech

Apple A15 Bionic Chip

CPU
55%
GPU
56%
Memory
50%
Energy efficiency and battery life
82%

Hisilicon Kirin 970

CPU
15%
GPU
12%
Memory
22%
Energy efficiency and battery life
64%
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