Huawei P10 Review

Performance

Hardware-wise, Huawei P10 is based on the company's latest in-house developed high-end chipset - the 64-bit HiSilicon Kirin 960, which is manufactured on the 16nm FinFET process by TSMC. The chipset packs an octa-core CPU, which consists of four 2.36GHz Cortex-A73 cores and four 1.84GHz Cortex-A53 ones. At the same time the graphics department relies on the powerful 1037MHz, octa-core ARM Mali-G71 MP8 GPU, which supports the Vulkan API. This system-on-chip was announced 6 months ago and debuted on the Huawei Mate 9. According to the manufacturer, this SoC provides 15% boost in CPU performance and a staggering 180% increase in performance coupled with a 20% jump in power efficiency. The all-new Cortex-A73 core from ARM is an entirely different generation from the previous Cortex-A72 core. It consumes 20%-30% less power than the A72 while providing improved performance. At the same time, it is obvious that the GPU has experienced the biggest improvement here and employs a new-generation microarchitecture that allows it to respond adequately to modern graphics and computing trends. Our review unit has scored 146039 points in AnTuTu, which places the device behind just about every smartphone that packs a Snapdragon 820/821 chipset. At the same time, the Basemark OS II and Basemark X tests put it on par with these smartphones. You can check out our reviews of the OnePlus 3T Review, Xiaomi Mi MIX, Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus, and the Xiaomi Mi 5s . The Ice Storm and Sling Shot tests by 3DMark also show that the SD821 smartphones prevail over the Huawei P10, but its results remain impressively high. For sure, you can enjoy many games that require a powerful GPU, so you can immerse in their graphics. The only thing we've noticed is that while the device relies on the CPU mainly, it is quite power efficient, but when the GPU comes into play for a longer time, the battery drains very quickly. If you check out the Geekbench 4 results, Huawei P10 is on par with the SD821 smartphones according to the single-core result and significantly outperforms them in the multi-core one. In a similar fashion, it outperforms them according to the browsing and multicore Vellamo results, with the only real rival of the model in this regard being the Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus. The model is equipped with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, which is double-channel and clocked 1866MHz. Besides being the latest generation and clocked at the highest speed currently possible, it is coupled with a machine learning algorithm called Huawei Ultra Memory technology that intelligently allocates, recycles, and compresses memory, so the applications load noticeably faster. The chipset packs an i6 coprocessor for the USF 2.1 storage, which in our case measures 64GB. There are 32GB and 128GB variants. Of those 64GB, 49GB are available to the user. This type of memory is impressively fast and this is strongly supported by both the Androbench and the PCMark Storage scores. There are a number of sensors on board, including a proximity, light, accelerometer, compass, gyroscope, and a Hall sensor. Embedded in the home button, there's an under-glass fingerprint sensor, too, that is made by Fingerprint Cards (FPC1268 model). It is super-fast and correct, offering additional features besides simple unlocking such as associating app locks and file safe to it.