Huawei announces new Kirin 960 chipset with 180 percent performance jump

By tech2 News Staff /  19 Oct 2016 , 17:50

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.

Image: ioncannon (Weibo)

Image: ioncannon (Weibo)

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.

benchmark tests... Apple iPhone 7 and Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge destroy the Google Pixel XL

By tech2 News Staff /  06 Oct 2016 , 13:39

Many have been waiting for this and it’s finally here. We are talking benchmark results fresh off the just launched Google Pixel smartphones. If Google has priced its Pixel devices to compete with Apple’s iPhones, they might as well have some raw power to give Android users some bragging rights. Sadly however, this was not the case.

We already knew about the iPhone 7’s killer benchmark results. Tests showed a single core score of 3430 while multi-core cores revealed around 5600 points. Pixel also seems to have been benchmarked a couple of times on Geekbench 4. But the results are far from inspiring. The Pixel XL (bigger one of the two) shows a single core of just 1685, while multi-core scores seemed much better at 4004 points. While single core scores really do not matter that much when it comes to Android, it is a