What is the difference between HiSilicon Kirin 970 and Apple A12 Bionic? Should you buy phone having HiSilicon Kirin 970 or should go for Apple A12 Bionic? Well, you'll get all your questions cleared here.Compare two chipset models on the basis of their benchmark score (AnTuTu and Geekbench), pros and cons, technical specs categorised into gaming, CPU, GPU, Multimedia, and Connectivity.
HiSilicon Kirin 970 has a AnTuTu benchmark score of 238792 and Apple A12 Bionic has AnTuTu score of 407476. HiSilicon Kirin 970 comes up with 8 cores, 2360 MHz frequency and on the other hand, Apple A12 Bionic has 6 cores and 2490 MHz frequency.
Go through detailed comparison below to see the actual difference and similarity between both chipsets.
| Specifications | Kirin 970 | A12 Bionic |
|---|---|---|
| Total score | 238792 | 407476 |
| Frequency | 2360 MHz | 2490 MHz |
| Max size | 8 GB | 12 GB |
| Max display resolution | 3840 x 2160 | 2688 x 1242 |
AnTuTu Score | ||
| CPU | 66289 | 129259 |
| GPU | 73245 | 148052 |
| Memory | 50039 | 56934 |
| UX | 41387 | 63018 |
| Total score | 238792 | 407476 |
Connectivity Features | ||
| 4G support | LTE Cat. 18 | LTE Cat. 18 |
| 5G support | No | No |
| Download speed | Up to 1200 Mbps | Up to 1000 Mbps |
| Upload speed | Up to 150 Mbps | Up to 150 Mbps |
| Wi-Fi | 5 | 5 |
| Bluetooth | 4.2 | 5.0 |
Performance | ||
| Processor | 4x 2.36 GHz – Cortex A734x 1.84 GHz – Cortex A53 | 2x 2.49 GHz – Vortex4x 1.6 GHz – Tempest |
| Cores | 8 | 6 |
| Frequency | 2360 MHz | 2490 MHz |
| Instruction set | ARMv8-A | ARMv8.3-A |
| L1 cache | 512 KB | 128 KB |
| L2 cache | 2 MB | 8 MB |
| Process | 10 nanometers | 7 nanometers |
| Transistor count | 5.5 billion | 6.9 billion |
| TDP | 9 W | 6 W |
Geekbench Score | ||
| Image compression | 90.1 Mpixels/s | 131.35 Mpixels/s |
| Face detection | 11.4 images/s | 17.45 images/s |
| Speech recognition | 24.4 words/s | 70.4 words/s |
| Machine learning | 21.3 images/s | 58.9 images/s |
| Camera shooting | 11.2 images/s | 17.75 images/s |
| HTML 5 | 1.59 Mnodes/s | 3.17 Mnodes/s |
| SQLite | 415.6 Krows/s | 670.45 Krows/s |
Graphics | ||
| GPU name | Mali G72 MP12 | Apple A12 Bionic GPU |
| Architecture | Bifrost | |
| GPU frequency | 746 MHz | |
| Execution units | 12 | 4 |
| Shading units | 192 | |
| FLOPS | 347 Gigaflops | 560 Gigaflops |
| Vulkan version | 1.0 | 1.1 |
| OpenCL version | 2.0 | 2.0 |
| DirectX version | 12 | 12 |
Memory Info | ||
| Memory type | LPDDR4X | LPDDR4X |
| Memory frequency | 1866 MHz | 2133 MHz |
| Bus | 4x 16 Bit | 1x 64 Bit |
| Max bandwidth | 29 Gbit/s | 34.1 Gbit/s |
| Max size | 8 GB | 12 GB |
Multimedia | ||
| Neural processor (NPU) | Yes | Yes |
| Storage type | UFS 2.1 | NVMe |
| Max display resolution | 3840 x 2160 | 2688 x 1242 |
| Max camera resolution | 1x 48MP, 2x 20MP | 2x 12MP |
| Video capture | 4K at 30FPS | 4K at 60FPS |
| Video playback | 4K at 60FPS | 4K at 60FPS |
| Video codecs | H.264, H.265, VP8, VP9, VC-1 | H.264, H.265, Motion JPEG |
| Audio codecs | 32 bit@384 kHz, HD-audio | Protected AAC, AAC?LC, Apple Lossless, HE?AAC, Linear PCM, AAX ? AAX+, HE?AAC v2, MP3 |
HiSilicon Kirin 970 has been announced on September 2017 whereas Apple A12 Bionic has been announced on September 2018. Check out detailed comparison with key specs below:
Benchmark measures the performance of the CPU. Geekbench is a benchmark that measures a processor's single core performance and AnTuTu score is the most popular and trustable benchmarking score which evaluates multi core performance. Kirin 970 has an AnTuTu benchmark score of 238792 points with CPU, GPU, Memory, UX score 66289, 73245, 50039, 41387 respectively.
CPU speed shows how many processing cycles per second can be executed by a CPU. Kirin 970 comes up with the architecture of Bifrost and A12 Bionic comes up with architecture of undefined. Former one has 8 core and 2360 MHz frequency and latter has 6 cores and 2490 MHz frequency. A larger cache time leads to faster performance.
First chipset has max size of 8 GB and Apple A12 Bionic has max size of 8 GB. It shows the maximum amount of memory supported by a chipset.
In terms of multimedia, Kirin 970 has Yes NPU with storage type as UFS 2.1 and A12 Bionic has Yes NPU and NVMe storage type.