Huawei smart phones are getting more attention these days and this is partly due to its own home grown processors. The Kirin processor lineup by its own HiSilicon subsidiary has finally risen to the occasion and the folks at Qualcomm should really start to worry especially with it its overheating issues. For instance, the Kirin 920 on the Honor 6 performs almost on par with their high-end Snapdragon 800 series processor.
With Samsung currently enjoying the limelight with its epic Exynos 7420 processor, Huawei is attempting to knock them off with its brand new Kirin 950 processor. This new powerhouse is likely to debut on their upcoming Mate 8.
Announced at Beijing today, the Kirin 950 is set to be a game changer. It is manufactured based on a 16nm fab process and it uses 4x high performance ARM Cortex A72 cores that are clocked up to 2.3GHz that’s accompanied by 4x low power Cortex A53 cores at 1.8GHz. Running in a big.LITTLE set up, this helps to optimise the Octa-Core processor to balance between performance and power consumption. As comparison, Samsung’s Exynos 7420 is based on a 14nm process, with 4x Cortex A57 and 4x Cortex A53 while the current Snapdragon 810 is based on 20nm.
For graphics, it relies on a Mali-T880 GPU and there’s also a little i5 co-processor as well. In terms of performance it does look promising as the preliminary Antutu benchmark scored over 80,000 points, surpassing the likes of the Galaxy Note 5 and the Meizu Pro 5. Likely to be featured on their upcoming Mate 8, a new device was spotted on Geekbench scoring over 6200 for Multi-Core tests, which is much higher than what the Galaxy Note 5 and iPhone 6s Plus have recorded. To cater for your future flagship needs, it will support VoLTE and 4G LTE-A connectivity as well.
Overall it does look very promising and out of nowhere, HiSilicon is looking like a compelling rival to Samsung’s high-end Exynos processors. Of course the Korean semiconductor division won’t be standing still and they are expected to reveal a newer processor ahead of its upcoming Galaxy S7.
