Apple A16 Bionic vs HiSilicon Kirin 980 vs HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G

Apple A16 Bionic

The Apple A16 Bionic is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the iPhone 14 Pro (2022) models. It offers 6 cores divided in two performance cores (codename Everest, up to 3.46 GHz) and four power-efficiency cores (codename Sawtooth, up to 2.02). According to Apple, the most improvements were made to the efficiency cores and the improved memory bandwidth (+50% thanks to LPDDR5). According to the die analysis from angstronomics, the e-core cluster still has the same 4 MB L2 cache, but the p-cores now offer 16 MB L2 cache. The SLC (System Level Cache) however seems to be reduced to 24 MB.

The Neural Engine still offers 16 cores and offers an increased performance of 17 TOPS (vs. 15.8 of the A15) for AI tasks. The integrated graphics engine still offers 5 cores and benefits mostly from the higher memory bandwidth. The new display engine supports adaptive refresh rates down to 1 Hz, the new always-on display, and improved anti-aliasing (for the dynamic island animations).

The CPU performance only shows small improvements to the last generation (Apple A15 Bionic). Still, the A16 is by far the fastest mobile CPU for smartphones and leaves e.g. the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 easily behind (in Geekbench 5.4 single- and multi-thread tests).

The chip is manufactured in the modern 4nm process at TSMC and integrates nearly 16 billion transistors (compared to the 15.8 billion of the A15 and 11.8 of the A14). Apple emphasized on efficiency and e.g. mentioned 20% power savings for the big performance cores and class-leading efficiency of the e-cores.

HiSilicon Kirin 980

The HiSilicon Kirin 980 is an ARM based high-end octa-core SoC for smartphones and tablets, which was introduced with the Huawei Mate 20 Pro in late 2018. It integrates eight CPU cores in three clusters. The performance cluster contains two Cortex-A76 cores with up to 2.6 GHz, the balanced cluster contains also two Cortex-A76 cores but with only up to 1.92 GHz and finally the power saving cluster contains four small ARM Cortex-A53 cores with up to 1.8 GHz. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a modern LTE radio with Cat 21/18 (max. 1400 Mbps download, 200 Mbps upload), 2x faster dual ISP (versus 970), a LPDDR4X 2133 MHz memory controller (34.1 GB/s versus 29.9 GB/s of the Kirin 970) and a 2160p30 H.265 video encoder (2160p60 decoding). The Kirin 980 is produced in the modern 7nm process at TSMC as the first Android SoC (after the Apple A12).

HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G

The HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G is an ARM based high-end octa-core SoC for smartphones and tablets, which was introduced with the Huawei Mate 30 Pro in late 2019. It integrates eight CPU cores in three clusters. The performance cluster contains two Cortex-A76 cores with up to 2.86 GHz, the balanced cluster contains also two Cortex-A76 cores but with only up to 2.36 GHz and finally the power saving cluster contains four small ARM Cortex-A55 cores with up to 1.95 GHz. Furthermore, the SoC integrates a neural processor (2 + 1 cores) for AI tasks and a ARM Mali-G76 MP16 GPU clocked at up to 700 MHz. Compared to the 4G version, the 5G Kirin 990 integrates a Balong 5G modem and is slightly higher clocked (2 of the 3 clusters and the GPU).

The Kirin 990 5G is produced in the modern 7nm (7FF+ with EUV) process at TSMC, the 4G version is still produced in the slightly older 7nm process as the Kirin 980.