The Huawei Mate 9 heralded the birth of the Hisilicon Kirin 960 chipset which has been revealed on benchmark to have a superior fire power. While the Kirin 960 is yet to be fully utilized in Huawei’s smartphones, the company is already rumored to be working on its next flagship chip which would be called Kirin 970.
Recently, a Weibo user reputed to be familiar with the Taiwanese mobile phone industry revealed some details about the Kirin 970. The Kirin 970 will be built on a TSMC manufacturing process and so it is not surprising that details of the Kirin 970 are emanating from Taiwan, TSMC’s base. Accordingly, the Kirin 970 is detailed to pack an octa-core CPU comprised of four ARM Cortex-A73 cores, and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores. The next gen flagship chipset is also revealed to have a maximum clock frequency of between 2.8GHz – 3.0GHz. In addition, the Kirin 970 will be equipped with Cat. 12 LTE baseband and would come as Huawei’s first chip to use the 10nm process.
The Kirin 970 is rumored to be unveiled in the first quarter of next year in order to achieve mass production. The Huawei P10 is also expected in Q1 2017 but will not pack the Kirin 970 chip instead would use the current Kirin 960 as the Mate 9. Rather, in accordance with Huawei’s custom, the Huawei’s Mate 10 would be the first to pack the Kirin 970 and that would likely be in the second half of 2017.
