Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 960 update: Includes octa-core processor, Bifrost GPU

Huawei makes their own processors for their devices. The latest one in their line-up is the HiSilicon Kirin 960 which they recently announced at a press conference in Shanghai.

According to reports, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer put the new processor to the test. They incorporated the chipset inside a phone and compared its performance against the iPhone 7 and Samsung Galaxy Note 7. As expected, the processor outdid the two devices in terms of the launch speed of China's most popular apps.

As for the components of the Kirin 960, reports detailed that the new processor is packed with an octa-core processor, which is powered with four high-performance ARM Cortex cores and A73 cores running at 2.4GHz together with four low-power Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. The new chipset would also be built on the new 16FFC process.

HiSilicon also claims that the chipset will provide a 15 percent performance boost while the A73 will sustain the performance through the power savings. This is an upgrade to its predecessor, the A72.

Moreover, the Kirin 960 is also reported to be the first one that has ARM's new Bitfrost GPU, which is the Mali-G71 MP8 GPU. It's said to greatly support mobile gaming and rumors have it that it's going to be used in Samsung's Galaxy S8 next year.

Other reports said that the Kirin 960 processor will also bring some improvements to the battery life. Huawei claims that devices equipped with the new chipset can run "Pokemon GO" for as long as one and a half days. Moreover, the chipset will support UFS 2.1 for blazing fast flash storage as well as LPDDR4 RAM and LTE Cat.

It will also bring a new Image Signalling Processor (ISP) for advanced camera capabilities. This will depend though on the smartphone optics. The Kirin 960 chipset is rumored to first come out via the Huawei Mate 9 which is set to launch on Nov. 3.