Huawei (HiSilicon) Kirin 820 5G official: features, performance and news

HiSilicon Kirin 820 5G is official: it is a high-end SoC (not top, therefore) with 5G modem, a direct competitor of the Snapdragon 765 and Qualcomm 765G. It had been rumored for some time, and the first smartphone on which it is mounted was also presented today: it is Honor 30S.

On an architectural level, the differences with the predecessor Kirin 810 are not many: the production process is always at 7 nm, and the eight cores are always four Arm Cortex-A76 and four Cortex-A55. However, Huawei has made changes to the core hierarchy: one of the four A76s can indeed reach one higher clock, up to 2.36 GHz, while the others push themselves to a maximum of 2.22 as happened on Kirin 810. As a result, Huawei can say that the performance of the new SoC improves up to 27% compared to the previous generation.

The GPU is one instead Arm Mali-G57 MP6, i.e. exacore: on the Kirin 810 there was instead a Mali-G52. The reported performance improvement is 38%, plus support for GPU Turbo and Kirin Gaming +, two software services whose purpose is to optimize performance during video games.

On Kirin 820 there is also a custom NPU that increases AI performance by 73%. The ISP is also completely new: it is the Kirin ISP 5.0, the same seen on the Kirin 990. The new processor therefore offers better performance in the processing of data acquired by the camera sensors, and unlocks the recording of 4K video at 60 FPS. Also on the modem side, Kirin 820 draws on the top of the range SoC, with support for SA and NSA networks.