Huawei Mate 8 Review: Examining ARM's Cortex-A72 And HiSilicon's Kirin 950


Mate 8 General Compute And UX/UI Benchmarks

AnTuTu’s latest benchmark returns a number of scores—too many to graph so we’re including a look at all the numbers in a table. This test measures subsystem performance in various areas like Database IO, Storage IO, CPU (Int. and Float), GPU (3D), and RAM (speed).

AnTuTu, Mobile XPRT, And Geekbench
General System, CPU and User Experiential Performance

Mate 8 AnTuTu

In AnTuTu the Kirin 950 and a 3GB of RAM setup offered the best score we've seen in this test to date, with strong memory throughput and CPU integer and floating point performance. GPU performance was more middle of the pack, however.

The MobileXPRT benchmark runs through a variety of tests to evaluate the responsiveness of a device along with its ability to handle many everyday mobile workloads, use cases and applications.
 
Mate 8 MobileXPRT

We only have Android devices available in this test, since it's an Android-only benchmark that's available on Google Play. On the left side of the results table above, you'll see scores (except for the Overall score) that are listed in time to complete, so lower scores are better. With the Overall score, a higher score is better. On the right side of the table, higher scores are better as well for the various test groups. Regardless, as you can see, the Huawei Mate 8 once again puts up the best results we've seen from an Android handset yet, with an overall User Experience score of 103.

GeekBench taxes only CPU cores in a handset (not graphics cores), with both single and multi-threaded workloads.

Mate 8 GeekBench

In the multithreaded test, the octal-core Mate 8 / Kirin 950 blows the doors off all contenders, including the potent Samsung Galaxy S6 with its octal-core Exynos chip and the iPhone 6S Plus with Apple's A9. However, in single-core processing efficiency, Apple's A9 still shows it can do a lot more with less, though the ARM A72 cores in the Kirin 950 are its next closest competitor.

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