With smartphone makers coming under severe pressure to maintain margins, quite a few of them are looking at designing their own chips rather than getting one from traditional chipmakers like Qualcomm or MediaTek. While Samsung started the trend by using the Exynos brand of SoCs that is designed and manufactured in-house by Samsung Semiconductors, leading Chinese companies like Huawei and Xiaomi seem to also have taken the hint, and are following in the footsteps of the South Korean tech-giant and making their own chips, or looking to do so in the near future. While Xiaomi has tied up with small-time chipmaker Leadcore to make self-designed chips in lieu of Qualcomm or MediaTek’s offerings for its entry-level models, Huawei has also been designing its own chips for a while now, which can be found on the company’s Honor and Ascend Mate range of smartphones.
Coming to Huawei’s Kirin chips, the company’s upcoming top-end SoC will be the much-anticipated Kirin 950, which is now being said to be powerful enough to not just take on Samsung’s Exynos 7420, but squarely beat it at its own game! According to a leak originally posted on Chinese social networking site Weibo, the Kirin 950 has recently popped up on the Geekbench database with scores which are significantly higher than the Exynos 7420, which is widely regarded as the best mobile SoC in the market today. According to the leaked screenshot, the Kirin 950 chipset has seemingly scored 1909 in the single-core test and 6096 in the multi-core test. When compared to Samsung’s Exynos 7420 chipset, these figures look significantly higher, seeing as the Exynos 7420 only manages to get about 1486 in the single-core test and 4986 in the multi-core test. While results from such synthetic benchmarks are not always indicative of real world performance, the stats do make it an interesting thought to ponder nonetheless.
Coming to some of the known specifications of the Kirin 950, the chipset is said to come with an embedded octa-core CPU with four A53 cores and four A72 cores clocked at 2.4 GHz along with ARM’s Mali-T880 GPU. The chip is said to support up to 42-megapixel cameras, and come with a Cat.10 LTE modem, which will support theoretical download speeds of up to 450 Mbps.
