HiSilicon, a subsidiary of Huawei, formally announced its Kirin 960 high-performance chip at a recent event in Shanghai, China. The latest chip offers better power management and a faster GPU, which makes it perfect for games and multimedia applications.
The Kirin 960 octa-core chip is the first to employ ARM's Cortex A73 architecture in a smartphone. It will have four of these and another four of A53 cores. It is also the first processor to employ the new ARM Mali-G71 MP8 GPU, which the company claims to offer up to 180 percent speed increase compared to the older T880, Trusted Review reported.
During the event, Huawei demonstrated just how fast their new processor is, pitted an undisclosed smartphone carrying their latest chip against an iPhone 7 and a Samsung Galaxy Note 7. The three flagship smartphones opened up 14 applications each, and the Kirin 960-equipped phone was quicker on 13 of them.
A Geekbench test result was also shown at the event. Apple's A10 processor is still the top scorer on the single-core test, around 3,500 against 2,000, but it was not able to catch up with the multi-core test. The Kirin 960 chip performed a 6,000 plus score, which outperforms the A10, Exynos 8890, Snapdragon 821, and even their own Kirin 950 processors.
GSM Arena added the latest chip can offer up to 15 percent increase in performance and up to 20 percent power savings when compared to its predecessor. CNET also mentioned that the Huawei cited the augmented reality game 'Pokémon GO" as an example of its power efficiency. They said that if players were only able to enjoy the game for only half a day with their current phones, the 960-equipped phones will last for 1.2 days.
Another interesting feature of the upcoming chip is its Image Signal Processor (ISP), which is said to bring camera image reproduction close to what the human eye can see. It is also said to natively support dual-lens cameras.
However, the community speculates that the rumored Huawei Mate 9 will be equipped with the latest chip. It will only be the time that the new chip will be put to a real-life test.
