It looks like Huawei's manufacturing arm wants to play with the "big dogs" in the mobile chipset world. They just finished testing their new Kirin 950 chipset and it scored an incredible 82,945 points in AnTuTu with their test rig. The Kirin 950 is their first chipset to utilize ARM’s big.LITTLE technology. Their tech combines four Cortex-A72 and four Cortex A53 CPU cores with a Mali-T880 GPU, which is why it posts such beefy numbers. The chipset includes 4G LTE compatibility standard, as well as support for VoLTE.
Of course, it's important to note that those test scores where on a test bench which was out in the open. It's possible/probable that the final silicon for the Kirin 950 that shows up in actual mobile devices won't quite have that much power.
Either way, these numbers indicate that Huawei has a legitimate shot at competing directly with Qualcomm and Samsung, as long as they can make the chipset in a large enough volume for mass production. It will be interesting to see a solid new third player in the mobile chipset arena. Even though NVIDIA makes a great chip, for some reason, they are having trouble getting back out of the backward slide they fell in a couple years ago.
Here's a breakdown of specs for the Kirin 950 SoC from Huawei:
- Four high-power ARM Cortex-A72 processors @ 2.3GHz and four low-power ARM Cortex-A53 processors @ 1.8GHz in a big.LITTLE configuration. A72 is 11% faster than 20% cheaper on power than A57
- 16NM FinFET process
- Mali-T880 GPU with 100% improvement over Mali-T760
- i5 Coprocessor for gestures, location awareness and listening events
- Category 6 LTE modem
- Support for LPDDR4 RAM
- Supports up to 2x 13MP cameras or 1x 31MP camera
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