HiSilicon, Huawei subsidiary, has announced their brand new flagship SoC – the Kirin 950. The new chipset is the true leap from the Kirin 920 which we have seen in Huawei Honor 6 review in later last year. Kirin 930 and 935 were also introduced later but were not as much successors to 920 as you will find today’s high performance Kirin 950 – It’s a real challenge to competitors.
The new Kirin 950 chipset is continuation of big.LITTLE setup of an ARM based octa-core processor with four cores of the latest Cortex-A72 (first ever in a smartphone SoC) and four cores of Cortex-A53. This high performance processor can reach the clock speeds which is significantly peaked from the flagship A57 based designs from Samsung and Qualcomm – more specifically from Exynos 7420 and Snapdragon 810.
At more extent, the two quad-core processors in Kirin 950 – A72 and A53 are clocked at 2.3GHz and 1.8GHz. Differing in numbers, the Exynos 7420 and Snapdragon 810 feature the Cortex-A57 + A53 combination where A57 is clocked up to 2GHz which is around 13% in numbers but according to Huawei A72 is overall 11% faster than current A57 designs, so with the slightly higher clock speed the Kirin 950 should perform about 20% better than the Exynos 7420 in tasks that are performed by the CPU.
| SoC | Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 950 |
|---|---|
| CPU | 4x ARM Cortex-A72 (2.3GHz) 4x ARM Cortex-A53 (1.8GHz) |
| GPU | ARM Mali T880 (900MHz) |
| Co-processor | i5 (Cortex-M7) – Always-on |
Also check: Kirin 950 comparison with (Kirin 920, Kirin 930/935, Snapdragon 810)
A couple of months ago the leaks of the chipset specifications have taken a round on the web. With no surprising changes or lacks from the speculations, in addition, the recent official announcement came from Beijing indeed includes the surprising benchmark score from AnTuTu – a tool widely used for benchmarks boosting it 82000+ on the bar.
There is also an upgrade to the sensor-hub of the new chipset which comes with the new i5 co-processor which is also a successor the i3 used in the Kirin 920s and 930s. The new i5 co-processor is powered by an ARM Cortex M7 core which can provide much more performance at much lower power while staying “always on” to constantly monitor the sensors in the device.
As well, gets the update the GPU in Kirin 950 – Mali T880, the latest from ARM and the first silicon implementation. The configuration stays as MP4 but the clock speed is greatly higher as 900MHz.
It’s very well expected according to reports that the new Kirin 950 is already ready to ship with the upcoming Huawei Mate 8 flagship device from the Chinese manufacturer.
