Hardware Overview and System Performance
The hardware in the Huawei P10 pulls no surprises. Huawei has upgraded the handset to their latest Kirin silicon, which we first saw in the Mate 9. With the Kirin 960 inside, we'll see a decent performance upgrade over the Kirin 955 in the P9, thanks to the upgraded CPU and much faster GPU.
On the CPU front we're still seeing an octa-core design split into two quad-core clusters, though the high-performance cluster is now ARM Cortex-A73 cores clocked up to 2.4 GHz, with Cortex-A53s at 1.8 GHz for the other cluster. The GPU is a Mali-G71 MP8 clocked up to 1037 MHz, providing roughly twice the performance as last year's GPU on paper. There's also an LPDDR4 memory controller with an improved 29.8 GB/s of bandwidth.
For other hardware we're looking at either 64 GB of internal storage with 4GB of RAM. There's also Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.2 and LTE Category 12/11 downstream/upstream. The P9 packed just Category 6 LTE, so the upgrade to Cat.12 is significant for cellular network speeds where supported. NFC is also included.
As expected, the Huawei P10 performs essentially identically to the Huawei Mate 9, as both phones pack very similar hardware. It's good to see the Kirin 960 performing as expected here.
Anyone moving from a P9 to a P10 will see an 18 percent CPU performance improvement on average, which is fairly decent, although the P9 already had a strong CPU relative to the competition of last year. The P10 is also 15 percent faster than the Snapdragon 821-powered LG G6 in CPU-limited workloads, though it can't match the Snapdragon 835, falling 10 percent behind. The Kirin 960 did, however, outperform the Exynos 8895 by a good 10 percent here.