this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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It's extremely impressive. A domestic chip on a 7nm process. That's equivalent to Android flagships of three years ago with the Snapdragon 865, in terms of the manufacturing process. To only be three years behind, after all the sanctions and doing everything yourself, it's incredible.
The Kirin 9000S is only 2% larger than the original 9000, which was made using TSMC 5nm. It performs far better than any 7nm chip.
CPU Performance almost matches the 4nm Exynos 2200, which because the 2300 was a no show is the best chip Samsung has.
GPU Performance although not a match for the original 9000 still exceeds the 5nm Snapdragon 888.
Geek Bench 5 Multi/Single core Scores
Geekerwan Review of the Kirin 9000S, with English subtitles
Source of the SD 865 relative performance charts
Wow that is extremely impressive on the CPU side in terms of raw performance. I guess having their own OS in harmony OS also helps with optimisation. Over 1000 on the single core side, right between the 865 and 888. Energy efficiency still can't match the 865 on the old TSMC process, but it's better than the 888 and 8 gen 1 on Samsungs process. The 8+ gen 1 and 8 gen 2 on the new TSMC process absolutely destroy it in energy efficiency though.
As for the GPU, raw numbers aren't the most important, many ARM GPUs, especially those from Mali, perform poorly in certain situations outside of benchmarks due to poor drivers. It's why people always recommend Adreno GPUs for game emulsion on Android. So it really depends on how Huawei has integrated it on that side. All in all, it's still very impressive.
I don't think the CPU performance is down to optimization. The 4 custom Taishan performance cores having hyper threading is probably why. The Kirin 9000S has 8 cores / 12 threads, which is why the multi-core score is so high.
The GPU drivers definitely aren't ready yet; it can't render Genshin Impact correctly. It's not an ARM Mali reference design; it's Huawei own Maleoon 910. The only things from ARM are the Cortex-A510 efficiency cores, and the instruction set.
Yeah I'm positive that Huawei went their own direction with the GPU because of how bad Mali has been lately, but getting the drivers to work will be a huge task