Huawei released the Hisilicon Kirin 960 early this week and it will be fair to say they have done a good job with the high-end SoC. Yesterday, rumours of the company’s upcoming mid-range chip, the Kirin 660 started to surface online.
The Kirin 660 is expected to compete with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 65x series and even offer better performance than the recently announced Snapdragon 653. The Kirin 960 has been rumoured to feature 2 Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.2GHz and 4 Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. The GPU will be a Mali-G71 Mp4 and the chip will be built based on the 16nm process.
Sources have also mentioned that the new chip will have Cat. 9 LTE supporting download speeds of up to 300Mbps and upload speeds of up to 150Mbps. If Huawei adds CDMA support like they did with the Kirin 960, then the success of the Honor 5x will likely pale in comparison with any other mid-range device they decide to launch in North America that sports the new processor.
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The Kirin 960 is already starting to net some points against the Snapdragon 653, such as featuring a higher clocked Cortex-A73 core at 2.2GHz as against the 653’s 1.95GHz. But there are still a lot of unknown details before we can say it is a winner. So until Huawei officially announces the new chip, we’ll just have to wait.
