Huawei’s been an up and coming mobile CPU manufacturer for a while now, and it seems their latest try at the mobile game is making some serious marks in the pavement. While Qualcomm just started releasing their newest chipset, the Snapdragon 801, to various manufacturers, it seems that Huawei’s latest 8-core (octa-core) Kirin 920 CPU actually beats the Snapdragon 801 in an AnTuTu benchmark found in the AnTuTu database. If you haven’t been following the latest in the mobile processor wars the Snapdragon 801 is Qualcomm’s latest CPU that powers upcoming Spring 2014 powerhouse phones such as the Sony Xperia Z2 and Samsung Galaxy S5. The Huawei Kirin 920 Octa-core CPU is a big.Little architecture CPU, which means that although it’s a 8-core CPU on the surface, it’s actually powered by 2 quad-core CPUs working together to create a more power-efficient environment. Specifically the Kirin 920 CPU is powered by a quad-core with ARM Cortex-A7 cores and a quad-core with ARM Cortex-A15 cores. While the AnTuTu benchmark suggests the processor is running at 1.3GHz, we highly doubt these results are from a processor running at that low of a frequency considering the Snapdragon 801 runs at 2.5GHz on the high end.
The score achieved by the Kirin 920 is 37,363, which is just above the Snapdragon 801’s 36,469 by about 10%, give or take. That’s a much larger margin than the difference between the Kirin 920 and say the Snapdragon 805, which comes in at 37,780 and is Qualcomm’s next-generation chip launching sometime this summer and will likely be featured in Fall 2014 flagship phones. What’s rather insane is comparing any of these processors to the Nvidia Tegra K1 which absolutely decimates everything in its path. What’s going to be really curious here is whether or not Huawei or Nvidia get their CPUs into any major phones or not this year, as previous years haven’t exactly been to kind to either company in terms of market share for their processors. Huawei’s Kirin 920 sports some pretty impressive specs outside of just sheer speed too; it’s capable of pushing 2K displays thanks to the integrated Mali 628MP4 GPU, supports dual-channel DDR3 RAM and even allows for cameras up to 32 megapixels. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 801 supports up to 50 megapixels for reference, but we doubt we’ll see anything quite that high unless the rumors of that new Oppo Find 7 are true. At this point we’re thinking Huawei is going to pack this chip inside the rumored Huawei Ascend D3, which looks to be their late Spring/early summer flagship device. All the specs rumored for the device fit in with the processor here, so things are looking quite good at this point!
