The first 7nm chipset on Android still trails Apple's A12 benchmarks, despite lofty claims
Android's 7nm processor era will soon be upon us, with the introduction of Huawei's Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro about two weeks from now. As we witnessed with Apple's A12 Bionic in the iPhone XS and XS Max, the era will be fast, and it will be powerful, all without taking a further toll on battery life.
The first Geekbench result of Huawei's Kirin 980 chipset, built with the 7nm production node, has just appeared, straight from the upcoming Mate 20. The handset scored 3390 points on the single-core test, and 10318 on the multi-core. That's way above the best scores that 10nm chipsets like Samsung's Exynos 9810 in the Galaxy Note 9, or a Snapdragon 845 in OnePlus 6, have to offer on this test, and yet is below what the iPhone XS and XS Max score with smaller amounts of RAM.
The top iPhone XS score on Geekbench is currently 4795 on the single-core, and 11170 on the multi-core test, or 10-30% higher than Android's first 7nm chipset, despite Huawei's expressed confidence that its chipset is better than A12.
Still, benchmarks aren't that indicative of real-life performance anyway, plus we are likely talking about a pre-release version of the Mate 20, and the results might get higher when it is launched for retail users with finalized software. That same software is the other good news in the Mate 20's benchmark snapshot, as you can see below, apart from the performance boost. The phone will apparently be the first from a major manufacturer to ship with Android 9.0 Pie out of the box. Sweet!
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