Huawei has come a long way as a smartphone chipmaker. The company’s new Kirin 950 and 955 chipsets are good enough to compete with MediaTek’s top end flagship SoCs. Naturally, we could expect the upcoming Kirin 960 chipset to be even more powerful and today, we have got some details about the chip from the noted analyst from China, Pan Jiutang.

Kirin 950 chip image
Kirin 950

He reveals today that Kirin 960 may not be a huge upgrade as compared to the current generation Kirin 955, but still there are some things that are going to change like the Cores inside. Huawei will reportedly stick with TSMC’s 16nm process for the Kirin 960, but the high-end Cortex A72 cores inside will be replaced by its successor, Artemis cores. So, the Kirin 960 will be a combination of Artemis cores and Cortex A53 cores in an octa-core architecture.

Kirin 960 chip details

In terms of GPU, the company is said to upgrade to an octa-core one, much-needed upgrade from the current quad-core Mali-T880 MP4 GPU found in the Kirin 950. Finally, the chip is said to come with support for Cat. 12 LTE networks and CDMA networks, becoming the first true full netcom chip from the company. These specs would also make the most powerful chip from the company till date!

It is still early to know whether this information will turn out to be true, but the analyst is usually right with his predictions. We can expect official details sometime in the second half of the year.