Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 960 Is Ready To Take On Qualcomm and Samsung

The other week, Huawei’s HiSilicon lifted the lid on the details about its new high performance Kirin 960 mobile application processor, and it looks like it’s squarely aimed at taking on Qualcomm and Samsung in the high-end SoC market this time around. So, let’s take a closer look at the finer details that the Kirin 960 is bringing to the table, which goes above and beyond just improved performance.

To re-cover the basics, the Kirin 960 is an octa-core big.LITTLE CPU design, based on four high-performance ARM Cortex A73 cores clocked at 2.4GHz alongside four low-power Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. The chip is also the first SoC to make use of ARM’s latest Mali-G71GPU and is built on a 16nm manufacturing process, which will feel familiar from this year’s Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890.