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.

kirin-960-block-diagram

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.

kirin960-gpu-performance
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.

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