Huawei has released 2 teasers in the last couple of days regarding its upcoming Kirin processor. The first (rather odd) teaser showed us two walnuts and teased the processor by adding the number 64 next to them, which was a rather interesting approach by this Chinese manufacturer. The second teaser image was somewhat more obvious, Huawei used an hourglass in which it put the name of the processor itself and the model number, but didn’t actually show us the whole word nor number, so we had to guess which is it. It turns out we were right, anyhow, let’s see what the company released.
This Chinese company released a new member of the Kirin family of processors, Huawei’s very own processor brand, carrying the 620 model number. We already assumed Huawei will release the Kirin 620 SoC considering one of Huawei’s upcoming mid-range handsets was certified by TENAA recently and this (then yet unannounced) processor was listed there. Anyhow, let’s check out the chip itself. Kirin 620 is not exactly a top-tier processor, but it should great in the mid-range category. This is a 64-bit octa-core processor based on the Cortex-A53 architecture. We’re talking about a 28nm manufacturing process here and this chip is clocked at 1.2GHz. The SoC ships with Mali450 MP4 GPU for graphics processing and supports LPDDR3 RAM, up to 13-megapixel camera and 1080p 30Hz video encoding / decoding. This SoC integrates a baseband chip, of course, and supports up to 150Mbps LTE Cat.4 network speeds and these networks: GSM / TD-SCDMA / WCDMA / TD-LTE /LTE FDD. Huawei also added that the performance increased here as well, compared to the 32-bit architecture, we’re talking about a 25% increase, at least according to the company.
This SoC can be compared to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410 to some extent, both of them are 64-bit processors clocked at 1.2GHz, though this is an octa-core chip while the Snapdragon 410 is a quad-core chip. The biggest drawback of this Kirin chip is its GPU in my humble opinion, it’s a rather dated GPU, but I do believe the chip will offers solid performance. Huawei is definitely on the right path as far as their Kirin chips go, if only the could manage to lure some manufacturers to use them.
