In the past two years, Qualcomm can be said to be absolutely dominant in the mid-range processor market. Whether it is the generation of the gods U 骁 625, 630/660 series, or the newly launched Snapdragon 710 this year, they have earned a reputation. Winning sales. As one of Qualcomm's biggest rivals, Kirin has always been in the high-end series, but it has always been tepid on the mid-range processor. The latest release of the Kirin 7 Series (Kirin 710), 4. It is obvious that after stabilizing the flagship level, Kirin is not willing to give up the mid-market.
In the past two years, with the trend of upgrading the overall consumption of mobile phones and the rapid development of mobile games, in the face of hundreds of millions of mobile game parties and game makers of Rijinjinjin, the mid-range processor has become the most The cheaper choice. And Kirin 710, is the first shot of Kirin's mid-range market.
In terms of product strength, Kirin 710 adopts the advanced 12nm process in the mid-range processor, and is equipped with 4 A73 large cores and 4 A53 small cores. The maximum core frequency is 2.2GHz and the small core is 1.7GHz. Very familiar Big.little architecture; GPU uses Mali-G51 MP4. In terms of network, Kirin 710 supports LTE Cat.12/13 standard, downlink up to 600Mbps, uplink up to 150Mbps rate. As for cache information, ISP and DSP we temporarily It is not known. The above is the basic information of Kirin 710.
It can be seen that the biggest highlight of the Kirin 710 is the adoption of the 12nm process. We already know that the most important factor in determining the performance of a processor is the process, architecture and so on. The more advanced the process, the more The higher the processor's fineness, the more transistors can be integrated. More importantly, the finer manufacturing process also minimizes the distance between components and reduces power consumption. Especially for smartphones today. The architecture, the increasingly 'violent' architecture is more dependent on the process. Therefore, the 12nm architecture on the Kirin 710 can be seen as an upgraded version of 16nm. Compared to the 7.5T standard cell library of 16nmFF, 12nm FFC improves integration. (The density is greater), the official said that under the same process, can improve performance by 10%.
In terms of architecture, the biggest highlight of the Kirin 710 compared to the previous generation is the addition of four A73 cores. The A73 is not new, and its performance is not necessary. It is worth mentioning that the A73 was designed at the beginning. It is not blindly pursuing extreme performance, but prioritizing other aspects that are more practical, such as power consumption ratio, and then re-optimizing the architecture for the actual use characteristics. Therefore, A73 is also the route of average power consumption and performance. At the core, the Kirin 710 chose A53 as a small core, with a clock speed of 1.7GHz. For A53, everyone is more familiar with it. After all, it is a small core that covers the low-end to mid-to-high-end SoC 'Wanjin Oil'. Overall, in the CPU On the other hand, Kirin 710 first started from the pragmatic power consumption, did not choose some radical choices, chose a more mature and robust architecture, and improved the use experience through the improvement of the underlying technology.
On the GPU side, the Kirin 710 uses the Mali-G51 MP4. Although it is now 2018, G51 is actually released by Mali in 2016. From the official performance of ARM, the G51 is the most It can increase performance density by 60%, energy efficiency up to 60%, chip size reduction by 30%, and maximum resolution of 4K. But this is not the most important G51.
In fact, the most important thing about G51 is the same as his big brother G71. It uses Bifrost GPU architecture and supports Vulkan (this is especially important for mid-range processors). Compared with the previous midgrad architecture, Bifrost's biggest innovation lies in the use of instruction set shaders (ClausedShader). And Bifrost architecture can support the CPU and GPU without copying data in advance, directly reading and writing in the same memory, sharing control logic, the usage rate is close to 100%. In contrast, G51 is also more focused on energy consumption. the design of.
Objective test:
The first is Geekbench. After our three tests (taking the average), the single-core score is 1582 points and the multi-core score is 5569 points. Compared with the previous generation Kirin 659, the progress is very obvious. The overall score can reach 80% of the Kirin 970, and currently The gap between the most mainstream Snapdragon 710 on the market is very small.
In the test of the pi of the CPU floating-point operation, the Kirin 710 also gave us an unexpected surprise. The final result, the Kirin 710 test score even slightly exceeded the Snapdragon 710.
In terms of graphics performance, the Kirin 710's Mali-G51 is slightly weaker in performance. GFXBench runs, we use standard 1080P (offscreen) resolution data, 1080P Manhattan off-screen score is 21Fps, and 1080P Tyrannosaurus off-screen It is 39Fps.
In the 3DMark test, OpenGL ES 953 points, Vulkan 1134 points, although the Mali-G51 also supports Vulkan, but the pure running scores can only be said in general.
However, running ran back, but kylin also supports GPU Turbo on 710. In principle, in order to achieve the ultimate performance of GPU Turbo, Huawei has optimized almost all parts of the mobile phone system architecture, first from the most The basic register part is deepened, and the data transmission mode is optimized. Through the depth adjustment, the data transmission between the registers is extremely low, which greatly affects the efficiency. Secondly, the driver layer such as OpenGL, Graphic and other middleware and the upper part The frame layer and so on are also undergoing major surgery, and the corresponding optimization and modification have been made to ensure more efficient graphic calculation and processing. We also tested the GPU Turbo of the Kirin 710 through actual games.
During the whole game, the performance of Kirin 710 is not bad. For the gentle mobile game like "Glory of the King" is no problem at all. For some scenes that need real-time rendering, there is still some pressure. But in general, glory is still The curve saves the country to ensure the user's actual experience. (In the stimulus battlefield test, the Kirin 710 is limited to a maximum of 30 Fps by the game client).
to sum up:
In terms of performance, the performance of Kirin 710 is beyond the author's expectations. On the CPU side, thanks to the new 12nm process and the addition of the A73 core, the Kirin 710 has a vertical comparison of the CPU performance of the previous generation of Kirin 659, with obvious visible improvement. The horizontal contrast Snapdragon 710, the performance is relatively close, in the test also gave the author a certain surprise. On the GPU side, the performance of the G51 can only be said to be quite satisfactory, for some mild applications is still handy, but for When you need a complex scene that is rendered in real time, there is still some lack of energy. But with the help of the GPU Turbo curve to save the country, it is also good in actual performance. It is also good in actual performance.
In general, the performance of the Kirin 710 chip can indeed be said to have entered the ranks of excellent mid-range processors. From the terminal price point of view, the glory 8X currently equipped with the Kirin 710 is only a starting price of 1399 yuan, and at this price can be reached. Other brands 1500-2000 yuan used SoC performance. Not only that, glory 8X excellent ID design, exclusive AI communication and hand-held super night scene with good performance, from the terminal point of view to test the price of the Kirin 710.