Well… the battle is open. Apple is about to launch
it’s newest iPhone (the iPhone XS) and inside the
A12 processor will be working. Huawei however
throws in the Kirin 980. An Octacore at 7nm.

So how will Apple’s A12 perform which is also produced in 7nm techology?

While the current iPhone X has a performance of roughly 240.000 points in Antutu Benchmark, the Kirin 980 has been spotted with a whopping 360.000 score. That means that the new Kirin processor will outperform the iPhone X by about 30% if it’s purely about synthetic benchmarks.

But what about the everyday working style? Let’s be honest: an iPhone X still performs well and without any flaws and additionally it has a very good run time of a good day if you’re not playing around with it non-stop.

So while new devices running on Android still demand for a big battery (3500-4000mAh) to run for a longer time, the iPhone X does that all with a 2945mAh battery. The Kirin 980 however is said to last way longer than the Kirin 970 (about 12 percent). And also the speeds are newly designed. Old Octacore had 4 cores at high speed, 4 cores at low speed to share applications between them upon demand.

The Kirin 980 however runs 2 cores on ultra speed, 2 cores on high speed and 4 cores on low speed as the diagram to the right shows (click to enlarge. The Mali G76 GPU will run on 720MHz and offer 16% more speed compared to the Kirin 970 processor which is a good leap. Yet the question is: Do we really need so much graphics power? Even the ever so compley 3D games already run smooth on today’s devices. Be it on an iPhone X or a modern Android phone (Samsung S9, Huawai P10 etc.) – I personally see no reason why that should be pussed even further as games already run at 60 to 120fps (depending on the screen’s refresh rate.)

Now there’s the fact that Kirin 980 is indeed the first processor so far released with all the new tech specs as seen to the left (click to enlarge). But still there’s the question: LTE4 does not yet run on 1.4Gbps so this is not really an argument for the chip. There’s however no information if the chip will support LTE5, which will raise speeds up to 5Gbps once it will be introduced by all major cell providers. But even then there’s also the question if it will be available to the majority of the users as with higher speeds also the problem comes with less wide coverage. We already have that problem with WLAN where companies use tricks in order to maintain high speeds without decreasing range and yet not raising the transmission power over the lgeal limit.

And then there’s Apple with it’s new A12 processor where no tech specs are yet released. All that is known is that the chip is said to be 40% faster than the A11 processor and that it will enhance the battery runtime as well as it is also manufactured in 7nm process. With the iPhone XS and 6.5″ screen size there’s also room for a bigger battery which might allow the iPhone to claim way longer runtimes. And as the charging is down with a 15W power supply it may be a hope to see the phone being recharged to 80% capacity in just one hour. Whatever comes. Thhis is all interesting stuff and with the Kirin 980 there’s a new competitor released that is asking Samsing: “What’s your next step with Exynos?”