The Huawei P9 lite is powered by a HiSilicon chipset, a Kirin 650. It's similar to the Kirin 955 in the flagship P9, though with more modest resources.
The processor is octa-core, but it's eight Cortex-A53 cores while in the 955 chipset half of the cores are faster A57s. Also, the GPU is a Mali-T830 - similar to the T880 in the Kirin 955, but with only half the cores and at a lower clock speed to boot.
You can have a P9 lite with 3GB of RAM, same as the base P9. However, you start at 2GB, so you need to pay extra to match the flagship (and there's no 4GB option either).
Considering that many of the competitors still use a Snapdragon 615 (616/617), which also uses eight A53 cores and an entry-level Adreno GPU, the P9 is looking good.
The exceptions to that are the Nexus 5X and the Xiaomi Mi 4s, which use Snapdragon 808 - an older, but higher-end chipset.
While the Huawei P9 lite can't match the flagship P9 in performance (and no one expected it to), it's very competitive in its price range. It mostly beats the S615 phones (though the HTC One A9 comes close) and shows an overall performance similar to the S808 ones.
Higher is better
Higher is better
Multicore performance is excellent, beating even the Nexus 5X. The S808 chipset replaces four of the A53 cores with two A57s, but their combined force is about equal.
Of course, the A57 is faster than the A53 so the single-thread score goes in favor of the Nexus and Xiaomi. The flagship P9 uses Cortex-A72 cores (the successor to A57) is even faster and there's four of them, which really makes an impact on multi-core performance.
Higher is better
Higher is better
The Huawei P9 and P9 lite both use 1080p screens, but the Lite model has only half of the GPU cores. Looking at the results, the difference in clock speed doesn't have that much of an impact.
The Kirin 650 with Mali-T880MP2 has an edge over the Adreno 405 crowd. Qualcomm has moved the Adreno 5xx GPUs, but such Snapdragons are rare in 5" segment (and those are usually expensive).
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Higher is better
Basemark X confirms the findings from GFX Bench - games will run slightly better on the P9 lite than on most similarly priced phones, except the few that went with the Snapdragon 808 (which has a premium GPU).
Higher is better
Higher is better
We've been testing a Huawei P9 lite with 2GB of RAM. It's fairly snappy, but heavier apps sometimes need a moment when you switch into or away from them. Once loaded, the apps would usually run just fine.
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