HiSilicon has announced its newest flagship SoC, the Kirin 950, which will be a direct successor of the Kirin 920 SoC that was powering Huawei's earlier available Honor 6 smartphone.

While earlier HiSilicon SoCs were not competitive due to rather weak GPU and low efficiency of the SoC, the newest flagship Kirin 950 SoC promises plenty of improvements in those segments. Based on a big.LITTLE design with four Cortex-A72 and four Cortex-A53 cores, the Kirin 950 is actually the second SoC, after Mediatek's latest SoC, which ships with ARM's latest CPU core design.

Thanks to the new TSMC 16FF+ FinFET manufacturing process, HiSilicon managed to push Cortex-A72 cores to 2.3GHz while more power efficient quad-core Cortex-A53 cluster ended up clocked at up to 1.8GHz. According to HiSilicon, thanks to 11 percent faster clocks of the quad-core Cortex-A72 cluster, we should see around 20 percent improvement compared to the Exynos 7420 SoC, at least when it comes to CPU-intensive tasks.




HiSilicon made significant improvements on the GPU side as well, pairing up the octa-core design with the new Mali T880 GPU, also making it the first SoC to feature that precise ARM GPU. HiSilicon used MP4 version with clocks set at up to 900MHz.

When it comes to memory system, HiSilicon's new SoC uses a hybrid LPDDR3/LPDDR4 memory controller, which should make the implementation much easier. The new Kirin 950 SoC also features the new ISP and DSP improvements which should bring significantly better camera performance. The SoC is also capable of decoding HEVC at up to 4K resolution and 30fps.

The HiSilicon Kirin 950 SoC also features Balong modem capable of 5-mode Cat. 6 300Mbps LTE and has a new sensor hub powered by ARM Cortex M7 core.

Thanks to the new TSMC 16FF++ manufacturing process and the octa-core design with the new Cortex-A72 cores, HiSilicon promises significant performance improvements.

We are yet to see the new HiSilicon Kirin 950 SoC in an actual device, but since there was a live demo system running during presentation, it was just a mater of time before we see it in the newest Huawei flagship smartphone.






Source: via Anandtech.com.