Huawei’s sub-brand, Honor, had introduced a number of products yesterday, including their Honor 6X mid-range smartphone, Honor Pad 2 tablet and the Honor Watch X1 smartwatch. Now, both Huawei’s and Honor’s smartphones are fueled by Huawei’s in-house chips, processors which belong in the company’s ‘Kirin’ SoC lineup. The Honor 6X, in particular, is fueled by the Kirin 655 64-bit octa-core SoC, which is Huawei’s mid-range processor. The Huawei Mate 8 ships with the Kirin 950, while the Huawei P9 and P9 Plus come with the Kirin 955. That being said, the upcoming Huawei Mate 9 is rumored to ship with the Kirin 960, and we were wondering when will Huawei officially introduce that chip. Well, that has just happened.
The Kirin 960 is Huawei’s new flagship processor, the very best this company has to offer at the moment. Huawei has introduced this SoC in China, and the chip is using the big.LITTLE architecture, it utilizes four Cortex-A73 cores, and four inferior, Cortex-A53 cores. Huawei has built this chip using TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process, in case you were wondering. Now, in case you’re wondering what GPU is it packing, you’re getting the Mali-G71 MP8 GPU here. In terms of sheer performance, Huawei says that this chip offer a 15% increase in CPU efficiency compared to the Kirin 950, while the GPU is 20% more efficient, and its graphics performance is increased 180%. The Kirin 960 offers support for LPDDR4 RAM, and it allows for download speeds of up to 600Mbps thanks to the fact its modem supports 4G LTE Cat. 12/13. As far as upload speeds are concerned, this SoC can handle speeds of up to 150Mbps. Some of you will be glad to hear that the Kirin 960 also comes with CDMA support, while it also supports radio frequencies, everything between 330MHz and 3.8GHz.
Now, if you take a look at the gallery down below, you’ll get to see quite a few info regarding this SoC, including its benchmark results. It seems like the Kirin 960 did really well in benchmarks, and managed to outshine every single processor in the multi-core test, including Apple’s A10 SoC (Geekbench), while it is placed in second place in the single-core test. As already mentioned, this chip is expected to fuel Huawei’s upcoming Mate 9 flagship phablet which is expected to land either this or next month, so stay tuned.
