Huawei has announced the Kirin 950 chipset for phones, which is designed to compete with Qualcomm Snapdragon 800-series chipsets in higher-end phones.
Huawei claims that the 950 is 25% faster and 44% more power-efficient than the Snapdragon 810, Qualcomm’s current flagship chip.
The chip is made by TSMC using their cutting-edge 16nm FinFET+ process, a first in a phone SoC. This is superior to the 20nm process used by Qualcomm’s 810 – particularly in power efficiency – although the imminent 820 will use a 14nm process.
The Kirin 950 has eight cores in a big/little configuration, with four ARM Cortex A72 cores running at 2.3 GHz, and four A53 cores running at 1.8 GHz. The chip is designed specifically to optimize Android performance, and includes much-improved optimizations for camera performance and quality.
The Kirin 950 includes an LTE Category 6 modem, support for VoLTE, and Huawei’s new, more-efficient i5 dedicated sensor hub processor. Previous Kirin chips have been used in many Huawei phones sold around the world, including the recent P8 and Mate S.
