System Performance and Battery Life
System Performance and Battery Life
Huawei Honor 8 is powered by proprietary Huawei chipset Kirin 950 – the original chip on which the improved version Kirin 955 was built for Huawei P9. The two chipsets are identical at their cores with a Cortex-A72 and Cortex-A53 but the chip in Huawei P9 which is said to be an improved version is clocked at little higher than the original. In real, the difference is not so significant. In fact, Kirin 950 is what previously featured in Mate 8.
Going in details, the SoC Kirin 950 is built with an octa-core processor (eight ARM cores) featuring four cores of Cortex-A72 clocked at 2.3GHz (it’s 2.5GHz in Kirin 955 of Huawei P9) and four cores of Cortex-A53 clocked at 1.8GHz (identical in Kirin 955). Then both the Kirin 950 and the Kirin 955 feature identical ARM GPU, Mali-T880MP4 clocked at 900MHz.
What we have in Honor 8 is 4GB RAM with 64GB internal storage whereas it was 3GB with 32GB on Huawei P9.
When comparing results with other brands and chipsets, Honor 8 was not so good when it was tested for single-core performance.
Following AnTuTu test gave Honor 8 lower scores than the P9 and Mate 8, Even though Honor 8 was featuring 4GB RAM.
Honor 8 also couldn’t beat P9 and Mate 8 in Basemark OS II tests. But they are pretty much close unlike in AnTuTu tests.
Interestingly, Honor 8 took a long jump in 3D test crossing over Mate 8, P9 and even Samsung Galaxy Note 5. In Basemark X test it’s just below Galaxy S7 edge in the list we had with the test scores.
On Multi-core test with Geekbench, Honor 8 is still below P9 and Mate 8 where P9 is topping the list of scores what we had for comparing.
In single-core test with Geekbench, Honor 8 was a bit better than Mate 8 but keeps low than P9, Galaxy S7 and iPhone 6s.
Trying with Vellamo suite of tests in single and multi cores as well as the browser test, Honor 8 also couldn’t make it to impress a lot. Vellamo Metal keeps Honor 8 after Galaxy S7, LG G5 and Huawei P9.
In multi-core test with Vellamo, Honor 8 is stil below P9 and a couple of other brands.
Browser test Vellamo also keeps the Honor 8 at lower position than of P9’s and Galaxy S7’s
In an uninspiring way, with Jet Stream of browser test suite, Honor 8 could perform only to stay below than many other devices including P9 and OnePlus 3
Standing among the high-end smartphones, this mid-range priced smartphone is a big deal to checkout. Concerning over these numbers are only to have an idea what kind of powers a smartphone could have but in real, Honor 8 didn’t fail me at any situation. I worked really great.
One thing that bothered is that the phone gets real warm when you are using camera, more importantly under direct sunlight.
Battery is another good thing with this smartphone. It can stay up the whole day while an hour or two of GPS and navigation usage may drop it significantly but won’t drain it harder, you still will be left with a lot more. Then you get Ultra power saving with a very few set of features that helps specially when you are out of reach of recharging and want to have calls and text on. ROG power-saving is the last thing you can do to improve the battery timings while keeping the usable smart features intact. This thing actually lowers the screen resolution to 720p from the native 1080p, which technically lowers the battery consumption and allows you to do everything could do in full HD mode while gives you more time with it.
While the battery did perform well when in use, but when in standby mode, it still keeps being used by un-managed apps and services, which I somehow couldn’t manage.
