After the Xiaomi Mi Mix, we are all excited to meet the new concept smartphone to be announced soon, the Huawei Honor Magic. The company has already confirmed the release to be on December 16, which is less than a week away. While we are expecting some amazing specs on the device, new rumors about the phone has cropped up online, toning down the expected Honor Magic specifications to some extent.

The new rumor says that the Huawei Honor Magic will come with Kirin 950 octa-core chipset (when there’s already Kirin 960 used by the Mate 9) along with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of internal storage. This isn’t exactly mind blowing specification, but it’s still decent. Further, the phone is said to sport a compact 5-inch display with 2K resolution, which would translate into some serious pixel density (~587 ppi). There will be dual cameras on the front as well as the back (12MP). The front would also boast of Iris recognition. Finally, for fast charging, the Huawei Honor Magic is said to support 5V / 8A charging tech, which would translate into 40W charging, much, much faster than the current Mate 9’s 25W charging. However, the battery capacity is said to be limited to 2900mAh.

The Honor Magic is said to have already passed through the 3C certification website back in August under the model number NTS-AL00. Also, the code name for the phone is reportedly “Natasha”.

RELATED: Huawei’s Honor Magic Phone Will Be Expensive Says Analyst

The Huawei Honor Magic seems like an interesting device and we are all waiting for December 16 when the company will finally take the wraps off the phone.

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Huawei launched their most powerful chip, the Kirin 960, yesterday. Offering huge improvements in some areas and small ones in others. It’s no doubt an upgrade. It even has the highest multi-core test score on GeekBench 4.0, besting Apple’s A10, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 821, and Samsung’s Exynos 8890, but how does it fair against the older Kirin 950?

Like the Kirin 960, the Kirin 950 is also an octa-core chip but uses 4 cortex A72 cores clocked at 2.3GHz whereas the 960 uses the new A73 cores clocked at 2.4GHz, although the Kirin 955 is still the highest clocked processor from Huawei at 2.5GHz.

According to ARM, ”the Cortex-A73 delivers 30% more performance than current Cortex-A72 core devices and can even be clocked as high as 2.8GHz”.

The GPU is another place where there is a huge difference. Huawei has replaced the Mali-T380 GPU in the 950 with a Mali-G71MP8 in the 960 but left the clock speed at 900MHz. But because the new GPU has more cores and uses a new architecture, it offers a 180% increase in performance and a 20% increase in energy efficiency.

Coming to memory, both chips support LPDDR4 but the Kirin 960 offers faster performance due to the support for a higher frequency  (LPDDR4-1800 against LPDDR4-1333 of the Kirin 950).

READ MORE: Xiaomi Launches 87 Key Mechanical Keyboard for 299 Yuan

The Kirin 960 also sets the codec bar high by being the first to  support 2160p 60fps HEVC HD decoding whereas the Kirin 950 can’t go past 30fps.

Other changes include the support for UFS 2.1 storage as against eMMC 5.0 4K video recording, 4x Carrier Aggregation, and 4×4 MIMO.

The post How Does The Kirin 960 Compare Against The Kirin 950? appeared first on Gizmochina.

Huawei is having a great year, a really great year. After announcing 2 months ago that they have shipped over 60 million phones in the first half of the year, the company has announced the number of Honor 8 units they have sold since the phone launched in July.

At a press event held on Friday, Honor’s Vice President, Zhao Ming, announced that the company has sold 1.5 million Honor 8 units till date. Not stopping at that, he also added that ever since the sub-brand was formed almost 3 years ago, they have sold a total of 100 million phones. Part of this numbers can also be attributed to the massive success of the Honor 5x in North America.

The Honor 8 has gotten lots of positive reviews in the US and Europe most especially for its great build quality and price tag. The phone sports a 5.2” FHD display, 4GB of RAM, 32GB/64GB of storage, dual 12 MP rear cameras with laser focus, a front facing 8 MP camera, fingerprint scanner, and an IR blaster.

RELATED: Huawei Nova Plus Unboxing and First Impressions

It uses Huawei’s own Kirin 950 processor which is a combination of 4 Cortex A-72 chip clocked at 2.3GHz and 4 Cortex A-53 chips clocked at 1.8GHz. There’s a 3.5 mm audio jack, hybrid dual SIM slots, VoLTE, USB Type-C, and a 3000mAh battery with support for Quick Charge 3.0. And the best part is you get all these for just $400.

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July 11 is the date to mark on your calendar for the release of the Huawei Honor 8. I am excited about it solely because I want to see a comparison of its dual cameras against those of the Huawei P9 and Honor V8.

We’ve been able to lay our hands on renders of a white version of the upcoming phone. It doesn’t look bad at all. The front camera and sensor are positioned in the same place as that of the Honor V8. If both phones are placed side by side, the only way to tell the difference will be by the screen size. The back is where the changes are. The camera lens don’t share a single lens glass like that of the V8 and the laser and LED flash are standing vertically. Another the difference is the fingerprint scanner which is a circle on the Honor 8 but looks more like a squircle on the V8.

The Honor 8 will come with a 5.2 FHD display, come in 3 versions: 3GB RAM + 32GB, 4GB RAM + 32GB, and 4GB RAM + 64GB; and be powered by a Kirin 950 processor clocked at 2.3GHz. The dual cameras at the back are 12MP and there is an 8MP up front for selfies. Battery is 3150mAh with fast charging and it will come with Android 6.0 out of the box with pricing starting at $306.

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Huawei’s Honor is going to release their first flagship phone, Huawei Honor V8 this year, and it will come with dual cameras.

A few e-commerce sites have gone ahead and listed the device with full specifications and to be honest, the specifications and the images posted there, look very similar to the details already leaked out.

Although there is some variance in the description of a couple of the sites as one of the mentions that the V8 has 5.2” screen while the other one states that it will come with a 5.5-inch screen. Rest all the specifications remain the same.

It will be equipped with a 2.0GHz Kirin 950 processor and dual 12MP rear cameras. Huawei P9 also is coming with the same pair of cameras, however if you just remove Lecia certification, camera features should be exactly the same in both the devices.

The front-facing camera on the Huawei V8 is an 8 million pixel shooter, it comes with a 3000mAh battery and dual SIM card connectivity. The device is 6.95mm thick, weighing around 144g and runs on Android system 6.0 with Huawei’s EMUI on top.

The Huawei V8 will come in two variants 3GB RAM/32G ROM and 4G RAM/64G ROM (LPDDR4 1866MHz memory and eMMC 5.0 storage) and the price will be starting at $399 or 2590 yuan. As far as the accuracy of this leak is concerned, we will have to wait till the May 10 launch

We saw a white version of the device listed on one of the websites and it looked beautiful. It is built with a three-stage design, the middle is metal, and the front panel is covered with 2.5D glass with a bezel-less screen.

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Huawei is all set to announce the Huawei P9 flagship on April 6. The company has confirmed via recent teasers that the phone will come with a dual camera setup. However, that’s not just the marquee feature of the device as we expect pretty powerful hardware inside the device.

We have seen some P9 variants on the AnTuTu benchmarking app before, and now, a new variant of the P9, which is most likely one of the top-end models in the series been spotted on the app. The new model EVA-AL10 will come with the new Kirin 955 chipset and 4GB of RAM. We had heard rumors about Kirin 955 chip with slightly upgraded CPU frequency powering the new flagship, but this is the first time we are seeing the performance of the chip.

Other specs of the device, as revealed by AnTuTu are 64GB internal storage, 1080p screen resolution and dual 13MP rear cameras. Up front, there will be an 8MP selfie camera. As for software, the phone will be running on the new Android 6.0 Marshmallow version.

With these specs on board, the Huawei P9 managed to post a score of around 96,000 on AnTuTu. Given that the Kirin 950 could score only around 85K on the same app, the Kirin 955 does look like an upgrade. When directly compared to the newly announced deca-core Helio X25’s performance, its only slightly slower. In the previous benchmark listing, X25 scored around 100,0000.

However, when we compare the score with chips such as Exynos 8890 and Snapdragon 820, Kirin 955 is still a good 30K below their scores. But then, benchmarks only tell part of the story, so we better wait and test out the real life performance of the handset once released.

Stay tuned to gizmochina for more updates in the coming days to the launch.

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Huawei announced the Kirin 950 chipset late last year. The chip featured the powerful Cortex A72 cores, making it one of the fastest available SoCs of its time. However, since then, we have come across pretty good chips like Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890 which are likely to beat 950 in terms of performance. In fact, in the previous Geekbench tests, Mate 8 powered by Kirin 950 couldn’t cross the 2000 mark in the single-core test.

But looks like there will be a special high-end version of the chip. Today, an “unKnown HUAWEI” device was spotted on the benchmarking website, Geekbench, with significant performance improvements. The device managed to score more than 2000 points in the single-core test.

Even in the multi-core test, the device managed to score 7239 points which is better than the deca-core Helio x20 (leaked score). The specifications of the processor inside the device is similar to Kirin 950 with four Cortex A72 cores and Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz.

So, this could be a special high-end edition of the Kirin 950, probably Kirin 955. However, increasing the frequncy of each cores inside may not be the ideal solution. For example, with increased frequency, we wouldn’t want the device to overheat. So, it would be interesting to see where Huawei plans to use this high-end version.

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In the past couple of weeks, three major chip makers, namely Qualcomm, Samsung and Huawei unveiled their flagship processors for 2016. Huawei was the first to take the wraps off its Kirin 950 chip, followed by Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and finally, last week, even Samsung joined the party by announcing the Exynos 8890 chipset.

Now we have three major chips that will soon enter mass production. All the three chips bring tremendous improvements from its previous generation models, now faster and more efficient than before.

So, we decided to take a look at these three chips and compare them to see whether the newly announced Kirin 950 can compete with market leaders such as Samsung and Qualcomm. I know many of you would want to see Helio X20 included in this comparison but we will compare them all in another article. Here, we would like to see whether Huawei has done enough to take on the newly announced Exynos 8890 and Snapdragon 820.

Kirin 950 vs Snapdragon 820 vs Exynos 8890

MANUFACTURING NODE:

First of all, lets take a look each chip’s manufacturing node. I am sure many of our readers would already know that the smaller the size of the manufacturing node, the better it is for the chip. At present, flagship chips such as Exynos 7420 are manufactured using the efficient 14nm FinFET process. Samsung was one of the first ones to successfully develop this technology for mass production of mobile chipsets and has used this process for both Exynos 7420 and the latest Exynos 8890 chip. Since its currently the best technology out there, even Qualcomm has resorted to Samsung’s 14nm FinFET process for its Snapdragon 820. On the other hand, Huawei’s Kirin 950 is built using TSMC’s 16nm process.

Technically, 14nm manufacturing node should be faster and efficient than 16nm. However, that’s not always the case. We have seen in case of iPhone 6S, there are two known chip variants, one built on TSMC’s 16nm process and the other on Samsung’s 14nm process. Interestingly, there were some difference in the performance between these devices (read more about it from here) and the iPhone powered by the TSMC’s 16nm chip turned out to be better. So, in spite of using a slightly larger 16nm node, Huawei’s Kirin 950 could be as efficient as the Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890.

CPU CORES:

Another important difference between these three chips is the CPU cores. Huawei went with standard ARM Cores (4 x A72 + 4 x A53) while Samsung features four custom Exynos M1 cores along with a cluster of standard ARM cores (4 x Custom Cores + 4 x A53). Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 features all four custom Kryo cores in two cluster formation (2 x Kryo HP + 2 x Kryo LP).

So, which ones better? Well, Huawei features four standard ARM Cortex A72 cores which are very powerful along with four Cortex A53 cores which are efficient in a big.LITTLE architecture. We have got a glimpse of the performance of the chip in a prototype device and the results were impressive. In comparison, the Samsung Exynos 8890 comes with four custom Exynos M1 cores and four standard ARM Cortex A53 cores. While we are unsure of the actual specifications of the custom cores, the company claims that they are 30 percent faster than previous generation 7 series and uses up to 10 percent less power. As for Snapdragon 820, Qualcomm has decided to use just four custom cores (Kryo), down from eight on the 810. The new Kryo cores inside the Snapdragon 820 are said to be twice as powerful as the previous generation. However, we will have to see whether the decision to reduce the cores inside the new chip will affect its multi-core performance significantly.

Now that we know what’s inside each of these chips, it time to see which ones better. Its hard to say that for sure at the moment, but on paper, Exynos 8890 seems to be the winner. It features four powerful custom Exynos M1 cores along with quad Cortex A53 which company claims is 30 percent more powerful than the already impressive Exynos 7 series octa generation. So, its likely that the big.LITTLE architecture on the 8890 will beat both Snapdragon 820 and Kirin 950. Also, with just four custom cores, Snapdragon 820 is unlikely to beat Kirin 850, but that remains to be seen. So, if we had to arrange them in the order of performance from highest to lowest, Exynos 8890 will probably be on top followed by Kirin 950 and then Snapdragon 820.

As for the co-processor, Kirin 950’s i5 is supposed to be ultra-power saving, translating into better battery life. Even Hexagon 680 DSP which controls some tasks for the CPU in Snapdragon 820, boasts of improved efficiency and faster process times. So, overall power consumption on both the chips should be reduced.

GPU:

Coming to the next important part of the chip, i.e. GPU, both Kirin 950 and Exynos 8890 feature Mali-T880. On the other hand, the Snapdragon 820 comes with Adreno 530 on board. While the GPU is Mali-T880 on Huawei and Samsung chips, they differ in terms of the number of cores. Samsung’s chip comes with Mali-T880 MP12 GPU which features 12 cores, on the other hand Kirin 950 comes with a four core Mali-T880 MP4. Kirin 950’s four cores are clocked at 900MHz, higher than Samsung’s. Still, with twelve cores at its disposal Samsung’s 8890 will be able to render 3D and high-end graphic games smoother than Kirin 950.

As for the Adreno 530, we are not quite sure how well it performs as compared to the Mali counterpart. Previously, Adreno had an edge over Mali GPUs but with Mali-T880 it could change. Unfortunately, we can’t be sure of that at the moment. So, for now, in the GPU department, it looks like Kirin 950 with its quad-core GPU is lagging behind both Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890.

LTE CONNECTIVITY:

As for connectivity, the Kirin 950 features Cat. 6 LTE networks. This turned out to be surprising given that they could have used a better LTE chip. On the other hand, both Samsung and Qualcomm made the right move integrating high speed Cat. 12 / Cat. 13 LTE chip inside their processors with peak download speeds of up to 600Mbps.

In the end, we feel that the Exynos 8890 is better than the Kirin 950 in most areas. But both Snapdragon 820 and Kirin 950 are mighty contenders as well. So we will have to wait for their real life performance to actually judge which one turns out be the leader next year.

As for just talking about Kirin 950, we feel Huawei has come a long way as a chip maker and the latest release is just an example of their ability to develop and release fast and efficient chips on their own.

So, what do you think about these three chips? Do you think Samsung can retain its top position in the market (in terms of performance) with its new Exynos 8890?

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Just a couple of days after Qualcomm officially unveiled the Snapdragon 820 CPU, Samsung has released its own big gun, the all new Samsung Exynos 8890 chip that will power the company’s upcoming flagships in 2016.

The Exynos 8890 CPU will be built on the same 14nm LPP process as the 820. Unlike the Snapdragon 820, the new Exynos chip feature eight cores, with four Mongoose cores clocked at 2.3GHz and four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.56GHz. As for GPU, you will find the latest Mali-T880 for the best graphics performance. Although its yet to be confirmed, but it is said that the Mongoose cores can be overclocked to 2.5GHz and Cortex A53 cores up to 2.2GHz further driving the overall performance. Samsung claims that the new Exynos 8890 chip is 30 percent faster than its previous generation and up to 10 percent more power efficient.

Like the Kirin 950 chip, the Exynos 8890 also uses the Mali-T880 GPU however, its MP12 and not MP4. So, GPU performance of the 8 series octa will be much better than competitors thanks to its 12-core GPU. Further, it supports CAT. 12/ 13 LTE standards which promises download speeds up to 600Mbps.

With the octa-core big.LITTLE architecture, the Exynos 8890 looks like the better CPU as compared to the recently announced quad-core Snapdragon 820 and Kirin 950. But we will have to wait and see the real life performance of each CPU before making any serious judgments.

The post Samsung Exynos 8890 Chip Is Official, All Set To Take On Snapdragon 820 appeared first on Gizmochina.

Although all our eyes are towards the Huawei Mate 8 flagship which will launch on November 26, its looks like the company is preparing for another smartphone launch, the Huawei P9 Max. This will be the next generation model of the P8 flagship which was announced back in May.

The Huawei P9 Max was recently spotted on AnTuTu featuring high-end specs (model number P950S). According to the benchmark listing, the phone will feature the latest Kirin 950 chipset, probably the second device to use it after Mate 8. Further, there will be 4GB of RAM inside with 64GB of internal storage. This is going to be a true phablet since the listing reveals that the P9 Max will feature a large 6.2-inch display. What’s even more interesting is that the resolution is going to be 2K (2560 x 1600 pixels) which goes against Huawei’s principle of 1080p being enough for smartphone displays. Plus, the phone was running on the latest Android 6.0 OS.

With such high-end benchmarks, the Huawei P9 Max managed to score well above 73,000 points on AnTuTu. But the 3D graphics score was 16,822 points which is below many flagships like the Meizu Pro 5. In fact, you can compare the P9 Max with Kirin 950 and Pro 5 with Exynos 7420 side by side from the images below.

Apart from today’s benchmark leak, previous rumors have said that the Huawei P9 Max will come with dual cameras at the back with a side mounted fingerprint sensor.

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Yesterday, Huawei officially unveiled the Kirin 950 chipset with quad Cortex A72 cores clocked at 2.53GHz and quad Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. Later in the evening, the company confirmed that the upcoming Huawei flagship, the Huawei Mate 8 will feature this chip.

The Kirin 950 seems to be a great chip on paper and we would really like to see its performance in real life. With Huawei Mate 8’s launch just a couple of weeks away, we will soon be able to judge the real life performance of the chip. In fact, in the initial test rig set out by Huawei at yesterday’s event, the Kirin 950 powered smartphone managed to score a whopping 83000 points on AnTuTu which is better than any other chip we have seen lately.

Moreover, with Mate 8’s high-end specs and 1080p display (since Huawei doesn’t believe 2K is required on smartphones), the performance should be pretty good. According to a recent listing on GFXBench, we came to know some of the possible specifications of the Mate 8 handset. The flagship will be powered by Kirin 950 with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. There will be a 1080p 6-inch display up front. As for the camera, you can expect to see a 16MP shooter at the back along with an 8MP front facing one. The specs are definitely going to be high-end, so the overall performance should be better than most other phones we have seen recently.

With the efficient yet powerful Kirin 950, the phone should definitely attract the interests of power users. Stay tuned to the site for more updates on the Mate 8 flagship.

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We have been patiently waiting for the Huawei Mate 8 flagship for the past few months. But instead of Mate 8, we got a Mate S flagship last month. At that time, we thought there won’t be any more releases in the Mate family, but Yu Chengdong surprised us recently by saying that the company will release the Mate 8 before the end of this year.

Now, the CEO has confirmed once again that Mate 8 will release by the end of this year. He revealed that the phone will have a very good display and a powerful camera. Along with this the phone will be powered by the upcoming Kirin 950 processor. He added that the Mate 8 release has been delayed because they wanted to use this chip.
According to the recent leaks, the Kirin 950 will be powered by quad-core Cortex A53 and quad-core Cortex A72. The chip will be clocked at 2.4GHz with Mali-T880 GPU on board. A recent benchmark showed that the chip performed even better than Exynos 7420.
So it would really be interesting to see Mate 8 with Kirin 950 on board. Since we are just a few weeks away from the year end, we can expect a launch pretty soon.

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Huawei’s CEO Yu Chengdong had earlier hinted that the company will release its Mate 8 flagship smartphone before the end of the year. This was just a few weeks after the company unveiled the Huawei Mate S smartphone with Force Touch. Now, the latest news from China states that the Huawei Mate 8 will reportedly enter production stage. It is said that Foxconn has received the Mate 8 smartphone for mass production.

This further confirms that we will see the Mate 8 pretty soon. Since Chengdong had said that the release should be before the end of the year, we can expect it sometime in December i.e. a few months after the Mate S debuted. It should be much more powerful as well, as it is said that the phone will come with the next generation version of Huawei’s Kirin chipset, namely the Kirin 950.

The Kirin 950 is expected to be much powerful than existing offerings in the market right now. Even Chengdong had said earlier that the chip is faster than MTK and Qualcomm chips. But, how powerful is it exactly? Well, the chip was spotted on Geekbench in August and it managed to beat the current leader, the Exynos 7420 pretty easily.  The Kirin 950 reportedly scored 1909 in single-core and 6096 in multi-core test. That’s way higher than the powerful Exynos 7420 in both the test (1486 & 4970 respectively). So, we are all excited to see the performance of the chip in real life.

According to rumors, the Kirin 950 will come with quad-Cortex A53 and quad Cortex A72 cores with Mali-T880 GPU. Other specs include Tensilica Hi-Fi DSP, dual ISP, i7 co-processor and Cat. 10 LTE support.

You can expect the Mate 8 to be a high-end device, with a 6-inch force touch display, a large battery, 21MP camera and an all metal body.

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Huawei was supposed to incorporate the upcoming Kirin 950 chipset inside the Huawei Mate S that was announced earlier this month. However, the company sticked with its existing Kirin 935 chipset, the same one that powers the Huawei P8 and the Honor 7.

To be honest, Kirin 935 is not really a full fledged flagship SoC, given that there are many chips in the market that can easily outperform it. Agreed that the Cortex A53 cores will offer better battery life, but then performance matters a lot in a flagship device.

Well, it looks like we won’t have to wait too long to see the next generation Kirin 950 chip and if rumors are to believed, then the upcoming processor will be quite powerful. Huawei’s CEO Yu Chengdong had earlier hinted that the Kirin 950 was going to be very powerful, even faster than Mediatek and Qualcomm chipsets.

According to the latest information, Huawei will debut its Kirin 950 chipset next month and there will be at least two smartphones before the end of this year that will be powered by this processor. One of these will be the Huawei Honor 7 Plus, which is expected to launch sometime before the end of 2015. The second smartphone to feature Kirin 950 is believed to be the Huawei Mate 8.

As for the specs, the Kirin 950 chip will be based on the TSMC 16nm process. It is said that TSMC’s issues with 16nm FinFET is the reason for the delay of the chip to the end of the year. The SoC will feature quad Cortex A72 cores and quad Cortex A53 cores with a maximum clock speed of 2.4GHz. There will be ARM Mali T880 GPU on board, with support for LPDDR4 dual channel RAM, UFS 2.0 and eMMC 5.1. Further, the chip will come with a self developed ISP, i7 co-processor, Tensilica Hi-Fi 4 independent audio DSP and support for LTE Cat. 10 connectivity.

As you can see, the specs reveal that the Kirin 950 is aimed for the high-end market. The Cortex A72 cores will make sure that the performance is top-notch while the remaining four Cortex A53 cores will help maintain power efficiency. In fact, in the leaked Geekbench benchmark result, the Kirin 950 reportedly scored 1909 in single-core and 6096 in multi-core test. That’s way higher than the powerful Exynos 7420 in both the test (1486 & 4970 respectively).

Anyways, before we get too excited with the news, let wait for some more details about the chip. Huawei has not yet officially announced any details about its Kirin 950 nor has it revealed any event for next month. So, lets hope to hear more about the chip in the coming days.

The post Huawei Kirin 950 Chip Details Leaked, Coming Next Month? appeared first on Gizmochina.

After the disappointing Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, everyone’s eyes have turned towards non-mainstream chip makers like Huawei. This Chinese company has come up with decent mid-range chipsets like the Kirin 935 in recent years and according to the latest leak, the upcoming Kirin 950 chipset will be powerful enough to take on the Exynos 7420 that is considered as the best high-end SoC in the market right now.

The Geekbench benchmark shows that the Kirin 950 chipset managed to score 1909 in the single-core test and 6096 in the multi-core test. This is much better than Exynos 7420 which scores about 1486 in the single-core and 4986 in the multi-core tests.

Such high score isn’t surprising given that the Kirin 950 is expected to come with four Cortex A72 power cores clocked at 2.4GHz. The chip is also said to be built using TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process. So, a combination of four such ultra-powerful cores can easily outclass the Cortex A57 ones used in the Exynos 7420.

Of course, Huawei is yet to release full details about its Kirin 950 chipset. So, its best to take this news with a pinch of salt.

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Huawei Mate 7 was probably one of the best flagship from the company till date. The overall metal design, specs as well as a super efficient fingerprint sensor made it better than most other phones in the market. While we are patiently waiting for some official news from the company regarding the next generation version in the series, we have spotted a render which is allegedly of the Mate 8.

If you look at the design, its almost similar to the Mate 7. You get the same metal body as previous generation. However, there are subtle changes in the positioning of the various parts on the device. For example, the dual LED flash lies below the camera sensor, i.e. in between camera and the fingerprint sensor instead of the top left region. Another noticeable change is that the ‘HUAWEI’ logo that was on the front, just below the display is now absent. Instead, you just have one logo at the rear. The placement of the sensors on top of the display have also changed, and interestingly, we can see an additional sensor in that region.

As for the specs, the Huawei Mate 8 is expected to come with a 2K 6-inch display with the company’s own Kirin 950 64-bit chip and 20.7MP rear camera. There will reportedly be two versions of the device. The higher version will sport 4GB RAM and 64GB of storage while the standard version will come with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal memory. The flagship will support dual card dual standby.

If Huawei Mate 8 does come with Kirin 950, it will be interesting to analyze the performance of the new chip. We have heard a lot of good things about the new Kirin SoC. If you have been following our site, we had reported that the chip will feature four Cortex A53 power efficient cores and four Cortex A72 powerful cores clocked at 2.4GHz back in March. Yesterday, new rumors confirmed our report, along with other specs such as dual channel LPDDR4 RAM, ARM MAli T880 GPU, Dual ISP with support for up to 42MP and dual SIM support with Cat. 10 LTE connectivity.  You can check out the full possible specs of the Kirin 950 along with a comparison of the current Kirin 930 and 940 chipsets from this detailed article. 

Unfortunately, we still don’t know the release date of the Mate 8 flagship. But hopefully, it will be launched sometime before the end of this year.

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Huawei’s HiSilicon chip making division has come a long way in the past few years. From being a tiny chip manufacturer, the company now has big plans to compete with existing rivals such as Mediatek and Qualcomm. In this regard, the company seems to be taking big moves.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 supported Cat. 9 LTE networks which was much better than the Cat. 7 and 6 bands supported by other rival chipsets. Huawei’s Kirin 930 and 940 chipsets supported Cat. 6 and Cat. 7 band respectively, which meant it was slightly below Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 in terms of connectivity.

However, according to a report from China Mobile, it looks like Huawei’s Hisilicon Kirin 950 chipset will support Cat. 10 LTE networks which will be much faster than Cat. 9. This will put Kirin chipsets at par with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon series as even the Snapdragon 820 chip is expected to support this high speed network. Other chipsets which support Cat. 10 include Intel’s XMM 7360 and Samsung’s Exynos 333 modem.

We don’t see a Mediatek chipset in the report which supports Cat. 10, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility of a Mediatek chip supporting this high speed network band in the future.

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Huawei’s Hisilicon Kirin range of processors have come a long way since it first released in the market. Now, manufacturers as well as users are recognizing the potential of this new chipmaker.

The company’s latest chipset in the market is the Huawei Kirin 930. Huawei recently revealed in a presentation that the Kirin 930 uses a modified version of low power consuming Cortex A53 chipset to boost performance. So, with the enhanced four Cortex A53e and four regular Cortex A53 cores, the Kirin 930 balances power and performance.

But ever since we came to know about that Huawei Kirin 930 was powered by all Cortex A53 cores, we were wondering whether the chipset was made using the efficient 16nm process.

Now, Chinese Mobile Phone League Secretary General, Old Yao says that the Huawei Kirin 930 processor uses a 28nm process instead of 16nm TSMC process unlike earlier rumored. It is said that the upcoming Kirin 950 will use the 16nm process from TSMC. But unfortunately, the Huawei P8 which will launch on April 15 will use Kirin 930 chipset, so we may not see mind blowing performance from this smartphone.

So, what do you think about the Kirin 930 after reading this information? Are you disappointed or will you reserve your judgement until you see real life performance?

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Ever since the news about a possible Huawei made Nexus made the headlines, the company’s Hisilicon Kirin processors have suddenly entered into the spotlight. Before this news, not many cared about Huawei’s processors, but since it could make it to the next Nexus, everyone wants to know the true capability of its Kirin processor lineup.

This year, the company is expected to announce the upgrade to the Kirin 930, possibly Kirin 940 and Kirin 950 SoCs. However, as of now, we only know details about the existing Kirin 930. The processor is based on four Cortex A53 cores and four Cortex A57 cores clocked up to 2.0GHz. It comes with ARM’s Mali T628 GPU and dual-channel LPDDR3 RAM.

The SoC has a built in Tensilica HiFi 3 DSP and an ISP which supports sensors up to 32MP. Like the Kirin 925, the new Kirin 930 too features the i3 co-processor. Other features include support for LTE Cat.6, Bluetooth 4.0 LE, Dual Band Wi-Fi, USB 2.0. The processor was expected to hit the markets by Q2 2015 and will most likely end up on the upcoming Huawei P8 flagship.

Luckily, we have some details about the upcoming Kirin 940 and 950 processors too. Our source tells us that the Kirin 940 which is expected to be announced by Q3 2015 will feature four Cortex A53 and four Cortex A72 cores clocked up to 2.2GHz. If you remember, the Cortex A72 is the latest launch from ARM which is very powerful yet power efficient. The GPU will be upgraded to Mali T860 and it will support dual-channel LPDDR4 RAM. The HiFi DSP gets upgraded to Tensilica HiFi 4 and the processor will have dual ISP which supports up to 32MP sensor. Kirin 940 is expected to bring native 10bit 4K Main 10 HEVC VP9 Encoding and Decoding. It will feature the new i7 co-processor and will support dual SIM cards with LTE Cat. 7 connectivity. The processor will support the new MU-MIMO Wi-Fi ac standard, Bluetooth 4.2 Smart, NFC and USB 3.0.

Unlike the Kirin 940 which is expected to be a big upgrade to the Kirin 930, the Kirin 950 will only have slight modifications. Our source tells us that the SoC will use the same Cortex A53 + Cortex A72 combination but will bump up the clock speed to 2.4GHz. Other important upgrades include a newer Mali T880 GPU, support for Cat. 10 LTE networks and Dual ISPs which now support up to 42MP sensors. Most of the remaining specs of the processor are expected to be the same as the Kirin 940.

Remember that this news comes via a new source, so it may happen that some of the details of the upcoming SoCs turn out different. Hence, make sure that you take this news with a pinch of salt. Still it looks like Huawei is all set to strengthen its processor lineup this year with faster and power efficient chips.

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