Huawei’s Kirin 960 SoC with Mali-G71 GPU to come integrated with LTE Cat.12 & CDMA support

We have already seen the Kirin 950 SoC doing a pretty good job in smartphones like Huawei Mate 8 and Huawei P9. The Kirin 950 is based on the big.LITTLE architecture with four Cortex A72 cores clocked at 2.3 GHz each and the other four Cortex A53 cores are clocked at 1.8 GHz. It also sports a brand new memory controller that will be able to support both LPDDR3 and LPDDR4. Now we have a new offering from the company called the Kirin 960. The Kirin 960 will be a successor to the Kirin 950 which is currently being shipped out by the company.

Though there are rumors about the Kirin 955 SoC which is said to be same Kirin 950 SoC clocked on a higher side. The Kirin 960 will be based on the same big.LITTLE architecture. It has eight cores that are grouped into two clusters: the Cortex-A73 clocked at up to 2.53 GHz, and the Cortex-A53 at up to 1.8 GHz. The graphics component is going to be upgraded to Mali-G71, which offers better graphics performance when compared to Mali-T880 GPU on Kirin 950 SoC.

The Mali-G71 is based on a new architecture called “Bitfrost,” which represents a new level of high-end mobile graphics technology, while still maintaining the ultra-high energy efficiency. So we can expect some excellent performance on this chipset with low power consumption. This processor packing the Cortex-A53 and Cortex-A73 has increased the performance up to 30% when compared with the previous generation processor having the Cortex-A72.

The Kirin 960 also maintains the 16nm FinFET manufacturing process, which is the same as that of its predecessor. Huawei also manufactured the Kirin 650 SoC on 16nm FinFET architecture which was is powering the affordable smartphones like the recently launched Honor 5C. Coming to the graphics part, the upgraded Mali-G71 GPU in this processor will deliver 20% higher performance and will be up to 40% more energy efficient than the last variant.

The smartphones powered by the new Kirin 960 will be hitting the market sometime next year as it will go on trial production later this year. The Huawei Mate 9 is expected to be one of the first smartphones to be powered by this new processor which is expected to perform better than the previous variants. The Kirin 960, the first processor to equip the ARM Cortex-A73 will integrate LTE Cat. 12 baseband and will also support CDMA network. Stay tuned for more details!

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