Huawei announces new Kirin 960 chipset with 180 percent performance jump

Huawei-owned chipmaker HiSilicon has announced a brand new chipset called the Kirin 960 that should begin to appear in future Huawei and Honor-branded smartphones. This is why many would assume that it could arrive in the yet to be announced Huawei Mate 9 smartphone.HiSilicon has stuck to the 16nm FinFET manufacturing process and goes with an octa-core setup with four Cortex-A73 cores coupled with with four Cortex-A53 cores. As for what's new, the 960 will be the first chipset to use ARM's Bifrost GPU, the Mali G71 that delivers reduced power usage compared to the ones available in the Kirin 955, the Exynos 8, Helio X25 and others. And this one is special in more ways than one because it packs 8 GPU cores. Looks like Huawei's upcoming smartphones will be Daydream capable indeed.As for what the Kirin 960 supports, you get UFS 2.1 flash storage, LPDDR4 RAM and LTE Cat 12/13 modems. You also get an improved ISP.[caption id="attachment_342157" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image: ioncannon (Weibo)[/caption][caption id="attachment_342158" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Image: ioncannon (Weibo)[/caption]Looking through the graphs from the source, the Kirin 960 is indeed the fastest chipset, this side of Apple. It scored way above the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 and was second only to Apple's A10 Fusion chipset in both GFXBench and GeekBench. Multi core results from GeekBench also showcase better performance than the mighty A10 as well.