Huawei’s new chipset could give Qualcomm a run for its money

Mobile chip developers have been lining up their next generation hardware for a few months now and Huawei’s HiSilicon has just announced its new high-end Kirin 950, and it’s a beast. We’ll start with the main processing components, the CPU and GPU. The Kirin 950 is the first SoC based on ARM’s big.LITTLE technology to make use of four Cortex-A72 and four Cortex A53 CPU cores, combined with a Mali-T880 GPU for some serious all-around performance. Architecturally, it’s quite a fair comparison to make to the octa-core A57/A53 big.LITTLE chips that have proven popular this generation. The Cortex-A72 found in the Kirin 950 offers an 11 percent performance boost and 20 percent reduction in power consumption when compared with an A57, while HiSilicon is boasting a 100 percent increase in GPU performance over its last chip that used a Mali-T760. Some of these gains also come from the chip’s move on down to TSMC’s 16nm FinFET manufacturing process, marking another industry first for the Kirin 950. This puts the chip ahead of this generation’s Snapdragon 810, which was produced at 20nm, and on par with Samsung’s 14nm process. It is also a notable jump from the Kirin 930’s 28nm design.