Kirin 970 Might Be Better Than Snapdragon 845
Upcoming smartphones of 2018 will mostly be powered by the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset. Back in October, Huawei unveiled its new flagship chipset, the HiSilicon Kirin 970 chipset with an NPU. A new image has been doing the rounds on Weibo that reveals a few benchmark results wherein the Kirin 970 appears to outscore the Snapdragon 845 chipset.
The benchmarks are of the Huawei Mate 10 Pro which was launched in October and is powered by the HiSilicon Kirin 970 chipset. It scores impressively, achieving 213258 points. The difference between the two chipsets isn’t enormous and should definitely not sway a consumer to the other side. Also, synthetic benchmark scores barely indicate what the real-world performance of a chipset is like, especially when the difference between the two is so marginal.
A few weeks ago, Samsung confirmed that it would manufacture the Snapdragon 845chipset on its 10nm LPP process. And now, a new report by Nikkei claims that TSMC is set to take over Samsung’s role for manufacturing Qualcomm’s modem and core processor orders next year.
The report reads:
Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 835 and Snapdragon 845 processors are made by Samsung using 10nm technology. Snapdragon 835 processors have been adopted by a wide range of smartphone makers including Samsung, Oppo, Sony and Xiaomi, while Xiaomi will be the first to use the Snapdragon 845 chip that was unveiled earlier this month
The report also claims that an industry executive believes that Samsung is losing Qualcomm orders to TSMC because the company will not be fabricating 7nm chips in 2018. The report went on to state that “Qualcomm is still likely to transfer orders back to Samsung in 2019 if its 7nm chip facility becomes ready.”
