The Huawei P20 and P20 Pro debuted yesterday and their Leica cameras were understandably met with a lot of excitement. Performance wasn't so much in focus as the Kirin 970 that powers them was introduced back in October with the Mate 10 series.

Huawei P20 Pro

Still, we though to give the SoC a test to see how it fares on the new taller screens of slightly higher resolution.

The Kirin 970 premiered at IFA last fall. It is built on the 10 nm process by HiSilicion, native Huawei division. The chip is housing an octa-core CPU - four Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.4 GHz for performance and four Cortex-A53 at 1.8 GHz for power efficiency. The GPU onboard is Mali-G72 MP12, while the RAM on the P20 Pro that we used for the test is 6 GB.

Looking at the benchmark results, the Huawei P20 Pro sits quietly in the lower bottom of the list, which for this purpose, includes only devices with the latest chips from Exynos, Qualcomm and HiSilicon. Keep in mind that the P20 Pro is still not officially on sale so once its software is finalized the gap to the leaders will probably be a bit smaller.

The CPU differences between the latest Exynos 9810 and Qualcomm 845 and the 6-months old Kirin 970 in the CPU tests are more pronounced, but the compound tests came out pretty close.

That would suggest that while no longer the most powerful around the Huawei chip has aged well and the P20 duo is not likely to find itself out of its depth no matter how hard a task you will throw at it. Still, benchmarks are one thing and real life performance is often another, so we'll reserve any verdicts for when the reviews are complete.

GeekBench 4.1 (multi-core)

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S9+

8883

Samsung Galaxy S9

8830

Sony Xperia XZ2

8466

Huawei Mate 10 Pro

6783

Huawei P20 Pro

6679

Huawei Mate 10

6625

GeekBench 4.1 (single-core)

Higher is better

Samsung Galaxy S9+

3771

Samsung Galaxy S9

3759

Sony Xperia XZ2

2454

Huawei P20 Pro

1907

Huawei Mate 10 Pro

1902

Huawei Mate 10

1882

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

Sony Xperia XZ2

259244

Samsung Galaxy S9

250156

Samsung Galaxy S9+

246660

Huawei Mate 10

214037

Huawei P20 Pro

209884

Basemark OS 2.0

Higher is better

Sony Xperia XZ2

3859

Huawei Mate 10 Pro

3425

Huawei Mate 10

3415

Samsung Galaxy S9

3382

Samsung Galaxy S9+

3354

Huawei P20 Pro

3252

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

Sony Xperia XZ2

82

Samsung Galaxy S9+

74

Samsung Galaxy S9

73

Huawei P20 Pro

66

Huawei Mate 10 Pro

65

Huawei Mate 10

65

GFX 3.0 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better

Sony Xperia XZ2

59

Huawei P20 Pro

55

Huawei Mate 10 Pro

55

Samsung Galaxy S9

45

Samsung Galaxy S9+

45

Huawei Mate 10

43

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (1080p offscreen)

Higher is better

Sony Xperia XZ2

55

Samsung Galaxy S9+

47

Samsung Galaxy S9

46

Huawei P20 Pro

40

Huawei Mate 10 Pro

38

Huawei Mate 10

38

GFX 3.1 Manhattan (onscreen)

Higher is better