Huawei's most recent flagship smartphone, the Pura 70 Ultra, equipped with the new Kirin 9010 System on Chip (SoC), has been extensively examined by reviewers from a Chinese publication. The review sheds light on the capabilities of the new chipset, indicating that the Kirin 9010 represents more of an incremental advancement rather than a significant leap forward.
Kirin 9010: An Evolution in Chipset Design
The Kirin 9010 appears to be a refined version of the Kirin 9000S that powers the Mate 60 series. It is structured with a single 2.3GHz Taishan core, three 2.18GHz Taishan mid-cores, and four lower-clocked 1.55GHz Cortex-A510 cores, which are optimized for less demanding tasks. While the core architecture closely resembles the Kirin 9000S, Huawei has made notable adjustments to the clock speeds of the cores. The Mali-G78 GPU, clocked at 750MHz, remains consistent across both chipsets.
Performance Benchmarks and Comparisons
In terms of synthetic benchmarks, the Pura 70 Ultra achieved an AnTuTu score of 940,000 points, with GeekBench 6.2 single-core scores of 1,431 points and multi-core scores of 4,430 points under normal ambient conditions. Activating the phone's performance mode led to slight improvements, boosting single-core scores to 1,440 and multi-core scores to 4,436, outperforming the Kirin 9000S on paper.
| Processor | Geekbench Single-Core | Geekbench Multi-Core | AnTuTu Overall |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kirin 9010 | 1440 | 4436 | 940,000 |
| Kirin 9000s | 1350 | 4200 | 700,000 |
Graphics Performance and Real-World Testing
Despite the advancements in CPU performance, the GPU performance, as indicated by the 3DMark Wild Life EXTREME test, only showed marginal gains. The phone, however, demonstrated competent performance in real-world scenarios, handling demanding games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail relatively well. In Genshin Impact, running at maximum settings with a locked 60fps frame rate, the Pura 70 Ultra managed an average frame rate of 60.2fps initially, stabilizing at 55.7fps over time. The device's temperature peaked at 46.8 degrees Celsius during this test. Honkai: Star Rail, set at very high settings and 60fps locked, yielded an average of 53fps over 15 minutes, with the back cover temperature reaching a maximum of 49.6 degrees Celsius.
