HiSilicon Kirin 960 Octa Core Application Processor Features ARM Cortex A73 & A53 Cores, Mali G71 MP8 GPU

Following on Kirin 950 processor found in Huawei Mate 8, P9, P9 Max & Honor 8 smartphones, Hisilicon has now unveiled Kirin 960 octa-core processor with four ARM Cortex A73 cores, four Cortex A53 low power cores, a Mali G71 MP8 GPU, and an LTE Cat.12 modem.

The table below from Anandtech compares features and specifications of Kirin 950 against the new Kirin 960 processor.

SoC	Kirin 950	Kirin 960
CPU	4x Cortex A72 (2.3 GHz) 4x Cortex A53 (1.8 GHz)	4x Cortex A73 (2.4 GHz) 4x Cortex A53 (1.8 GHz)
Memory Controller	LPDDR3-933 or LPDDR4-1333 (hybrid controller)	LPDDR4-1800
GPU	ARM Mali-T880MP4 @ 900 MHz	ARM Mali-G71MP8 @ 900 MHz
Interconnect	ARM CCI-400	ARM CCI-550
Encode/ Decode	1080p H.264 Decode & Encode2160p30 HEVC Decode	2160p30 HEVC & H.264 Decode & Encode2160p60 HEVC Decode
Camera/ISP	Dual 14bit ISP 940MP/s	Improved Dual 14bit ISP
Sensor Hub	i5	i6
Storage	eMMC 5.0	UFS 2.1
Integrated Modem	Balong Integrated UE Cat. 6 LTE	Integrated UE Cat. 12 LTE 4x CA 4×4 MIMO

ARM claims 30% “sustained” performance improvement between Cortex A72 and Cortex A73, but the GPU should be where the performance jump is more significant, as ARM promises a 50 percent increase in graphics performance, and a 20 percent improvement in power efficiency with Mali G71 compared the previous generation (Mali-T880). Kirin 960 also integrates twice the GPU cores compared to Kirin 950, and some GPU benchmarks provided by Hisilicon/Huawei confirm the theory with over 100% performance improvement in both Manhattan 1080p offscreen and T-Rex offscreen GFXBench 4.0 benchmarks.

The first smartphone to feature Kirin 960 is likely to be Huawei Mate 9 rumored to come with a 5.9″ 2K display, 6GB RAM, and 256 UFS flash.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.