Huawei today unveiled its latest Kirin chipset — the Kirin 950. The latest chipset from the company is an octa-core chip that makes use of the big.LITTLE architecture and comprises of four high performance Cortex-A72 cores clocked at 2.53GHz, and four A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz for day-to-day tasks. Huawei has also baked in a i5 coprocessor with “always-sensing” technology. Think of this i5 coprocessor as a sensor hub that is always on, and uses a bunch of sensors like gyroscope, accelerometer and barometer to track your movements. Other notable features of the Kirin 950 chipset include a Mali T880MP4 GPU that offers a performance improvement of nearly 100 percent compared to previous Kirin chipsets, and support for LTE Cat. 6. The nearly 40 percent improvement in performance, however, does not come at the price of power consumption. The Kirin 950 chipset is based on the 16nm FinFET fabrication process that leads to a 60 percent reduction in power consumption. Huawei says that the reduced power consumption can lead to an increase in 10 hours of “normal” battery life on a device with a 3500mAh battery. Even better, Huawei has greatly improved the voice capabilities of its chipset. The frequency range has increased by 100 percent, while latency is down from a staggering 5-6 seconds to 0.5 to 1.5 seconds. Huawei did not provide any details on when its Kirin 950 chipset will start making its way inside its devices, though my bet is that it will start making use of them in devices from early next year.
