Chinese company Huawei is starting to make a name for itself in the US thanks to its partnership with Google on the Nexus 6P smartphone. But the company doesn’t just make phones. It’s also been producing its own processors for a few years, and the latest will likely be used in the upcoming Huawei Mate 8.

It’s called the Kirin 950, and it’s an octa-core chip with four 2.3 GHz ARM Cortex-A72 cores, four 1.8 GHz ARM Cortex-A53 cores, and Mali-T880MP4 graphics.

What does that mean? It’s fast. Very fast.

kirin 950

But Huawei says its chip is also energy efficient. It’s built using TSMC’s 16nm FinFet process, which is the same one used for Apple’s A9 processor.

The chip also has a low-power, always-on co-processor for sensors including the barometer, gyroscope, accelerometer, and other motion sensors. Huawei says this new i5 co-processors uses just 6.5 mA, while the company’s previous i3 version used 90 mA.

All told, Huawei figures its new chip offers about a 40 percent performance boost while also reducing power consumption by 60 percent, which should lead to longer battery life in mobile devices.

via MyDrivers, Anzhou, and Android Central

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11 replies on “Huawei Kirin 950 chip shoots for high performance, low power consumption”

  1. Question remains: what does a phone need that much power for? Isn’t that a bit of overkill for most users?

    1. Maybe its not just for their phone but also for their new upcoming laptop running Android or their own fork of Android.

    2. Gaming (mobile, set-top boxes, etc.), speedier image and video processing of the ever-increasing megapixel count cameras, and don’t underestimate the power of bragging rights…

  2. Has Samsung announced an a72 exynos soc? Mediatek is selling 28nm mt8173 in amazon fire TV, and qualcomm announced 620 and 820 at 14/16nm. If Huawei beats qualcomm to market in a cellphone, that would be amazing.

    1. Huawei last year had 46.5 billions revenue and only some 25% of it was from smartphones, Qualcomm in their financial year that just ended had some 26 billions revenue while Mediatek in 2014 had 7 billion revenue.
      Just to provide some context , Huawei is a lot bigger than what most people think and if they allocate resources to a project,they’ll get there sooner or later.

      1. Money helps, but is certainly no guarantee of success. Plenty of evidence to the contrary, in fact.

  3. The most interesting slide was the one claiming 56.5% CPU perf gain over Exynos7420 at 3.5W – the key being 3.5W, a sustainable load.

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