The octa-core chipset market is heating up. We’ve seen rumors about a new MediaTek octa-core processor. Major manufacturers like NVIDIA and Qualcomm are working on new chips to replace their current top of the line chips available today. Huawei doesn’t want to be left behind. The president of Huawei, Xu Xin Quan, let it slip yesterday on Chinese site Weibo that the new Ascend P6S will be powered by their own updated octa-core SoC.
The Ascend P6S is the successor to the Ascend P6 that was announced last June. The P6 is a great looking phone, and is one of the thinnest handsets available today. It’s considered a Huawei flagship device even if it doesn’t quite compete with current flagships from LG and Samsung. The P6S is going to build on the P6 with this new octa-core processor that Quan mentioned yesterday.
The current SoC in the P6 is powered by a quad-core K3V2 chip. The K3V2 definitely needs to be updated, so this is welcome news for fans of Huawei devices. The new Huawei octa-core processor will actually be able to use all eight cores at the same time. Current generation octa-core processors like Samsung’s Exynos chipsets only use up to four cores at a time. Quan didn’t provide any more details about the new SoC or any other specs for the upcoming Ascend P6S.
Huawei is trying to take advantage of the exploding Chinese smartphone market. Chinese consumers are very cost-conscious. Devices like the Ascend P6 and other phones like those from Xiaomi tend to sell better than flagships available from competitors like Samsung and HTC. If Huawei can offer a big performance boost while still keeping costs low for consumers, they may have an advantage with the P6S. Xiaomi prices even their high-end flagships so low that they sell out very quickly. Google is also focusing on areas of the world like China because of the growth opportunities that offer. We’re hearing lots of talk about reaching “the next billion users.” Those users are going to come from emerging markets. Huawei is poised to grow with those markets.