Huawei unveils Kirin 960-soc with A73 cores and faster gpu
Huawei has presented its new soc for high-end smartphones. In particular, the Kirin 960 octacore should offer much better graphics performance than its predecessor. Huawei has the soc produced on TSMC’s 16nm finfet process.
The Kirin 960 features a big.Little design with four powerful Cortex-A73 cores at 2.4GHz and four cores based on the low-power A53 design at 1.8GHz. It is the first soc to use the A73 microarchitecture, which ARM announced in May. The Kirin 960 also contains the new Mali-G71 GPU; it concerns a configuration with eight cores at 900MHz.
Particularly in terms of graphics performance, the Kirin 960 should score much better than its predecessor, which is equipped with A72 cores and a Mali-T880MP4 GPU. According to Huawei, the Mali-G71MP8 GPU shows an improvement of 180 percent, while it is 20 percent more efficient. In the graphical benchmark GFXBench, for which the manufacturer itself showed scores, the Kirin 960-soc is faster than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 821 and Samsung’s Exynos 8890 from the Galaxy S7. Only the A10 from the iPhone 7 has a faster gpu.
While the Cortex-A73 cores appear to be related to the A72 cores because of their name, AnandTech notes that it isn’t. The design of the A72 cores was based on that of the A57 and A15 cores, but the A73 is a successor to the Cortex A17 architecture. An important difference between the A73 and A72 cores is that the new cores can only decode two instead of three instructions per clock tick. Nevertheless, the new architecture is faster and more efficient.
Huawei provides the soc with a new memory controller with support for lpddr4-1800. The chip can also handle the fast ufs 2.1 protocol for storage memory. The modem supports lte cat. 12 and 13, which means that download speeds of up to 600Mbit/s and upload speeds of up to 150Mbit/s are supported.
Huawei presented the chip at an event in China. The manufacturer has not yet announced in which devices the Kirin 960 will appear, but according to rumors, Huawei will present the Mate 9 with the new soc on November 3. The current Kirin 950-soc is used by Huawei in the Mate 8, P9 and P9 Max and the Honor 8.