When it comes to mobile processors, most people know about Qualcomm. Some know about Samsung’s Exynos and MediaTek. But hardly anyone on this side of the world knows about Huawei’s Kirin chipsets. Huawei, again, is largely popular in Asia and even in Europe. They do sell smartphones here in the US, but they are primarily using Snapdragon chipsets. Huawei’s Kirin chipsets have been very powerful, and yet still efficient. We’ve used them in a few device reviews we’ve done of Huawei smartphones, and loved the performance we got from them. Now, according to a post on Weibo, Huawei is set to announce their newest chipset next week.
On Weibo, the image above was shared. Which shows that Huawei is looking at November 5th to announce their new chipset. In the picture, there isn’t any mention of the Kirin 950, even though that is what has leaked quite often lately. There are a couple of lines of text with the image that claim that the chipset is going to be built by TSMC using the 16nm FinFET manufacturing process. This means that the processor should be using Cortex-A72 cores. As well as adding support for LTE-A Cat. 10 networks. Previous rumors have also shown us that this processor is likely going to have the Mali-T880 GPU, as well as having support for LPDDR4 dual channel RAM.
Now this sounds a lot like the Kirin 950, which should be an octa-core processor using the big.LITTLE architecture. So we should see a quad-core Cortex-A72 processor and a quad-c0re Cortex-A53 processor here. With the Cortex-A72 cores being clocked as high as 2.4GHz and the slower Cortex-A53 cores closer to 1.5GHz.
Huawei has been making some huge strides in the mobile industry as of late. Not only are they the manufacturer for this year’s Nexus 6P. But they also recently overtook Xiaomi to be the number one smartphone manufacturer in China. Something that hasn’t happened in quite some time. Now to have a brand new Kirin processor launching, Huawei is looking to be unstoppable. It’ll be interesting to see which smartphone has this processor, first. Possibly the next Mate? Or the P9 coming next year.