Huawei Mate 9 to run on Kirin 960 chipset; will have curved display variant too

Image: iChagezone, Weibo

By tech2 News Staff /  01 Nov 2016 , 16:54

Chinese smartphone maker Huawei has announced that it will be launching its upcoming flagship – the Mate 9 – with its most powerful chipset onboard – the HiSilicon Kirin 960. The device is expected to be launched in Germany on 3 November.

The flagship phone is expected to come in two variants – the regular Huawei Mate 9 which will have a flat display, and the Huawei Mate 9 Pro which will come with a curved display. While the Mate 9 will come with 5.88-inch display with FullHD resolution, the Mate 9 Pro will sport a 5.5-inch AMOLED curved display. Both devices are expected to be running Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box along with Huawei’s EMUI skin atop it.

The HiSilicon Kirin 960 chipset was announced quite recently and it is built on the 16nm FinFET process. It has an octa-core processor comprising four Cortex A73 cores clocked at 2.4GHz and four Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. In terms of graphics, you get ARM’s Mali G71 MP8 GPU – making it the first chipset to be using this GPU.

According to Huawei, Kirin 960 offers 15 percent performance boost over the Kirin 950. It also supports double data speeds as compared to the Kirin 950. The Kirin 960’s Mali G71 MP8 GPU is expected to offer around 180 percent faster performance in gaming says Huawei. It provides Vulkan support. The Kirin 960 offers Cat 12 LTE donwload speeds and Cat 13 LTE upload speeds.

The Huawei Mate 9 and Mate 9 Pro are expected to come with dual rear cameras having 12MP and 20MP sensors. They will be paired with dual tone LED flash unit. You will get 4GB RAM + 64GB ROM storage variants, but some advertising material also hints at a 6GB RAM + 256GB ROM variant as well.

In terms of design, the Mate 9 is expected to be similar to Mate 8. There will be a finger-print scanner at the back.

Evan Blass has tipped the price of the high end Mate 9 Pro to be around $1,300 (approx Rs 87,000). Blass claims that the camera of the Mate 9 Pro will feature 4x optical zoom as well.

We shall find out the truth on 3 November.

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.

Huawei Mate 9 images leak with two cameras, up to 256 GB of storage

By Tim Schiesser on September 29, 2016, 8:15 AM



Images of Huawei's upcoming large-screened flagship, the Mate 9, have leaked on Chinese social network Weibo. The images show a large six-inch screen with bezels as slim as the Mate 8, with a new dual-camera system boasting Leica branding.

A slide advertising the Mate 9 has also revealed the pricing tiers and color options for the device. The most expensive model will deliver a ludicrous 6 GB of RAM along with 256 GB of storage for 4,700 yuan ($705), while the middle model provides 4 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage for 3,900 yuan ($585). The cheapest Mate 9 will set you back 3,200 yuan ($480) and pack 4 GB of RAM plus 64 GB of storage.

Color options also appear to vary by tier, with the top-specced model coming in six colors, filtering down to three colors for the cheapest variant. The phone itself seems to use a metal body, so the colors are appropriate for a high-end metal design.



The dual camera system on the rear is expected to use the same dual-12-megapixel sensor setup as on the Huawei P9, although the leaked images show an increase in aperture from f/2.2 to f/2.0. Internally, benchmarks have suggested the Mate 9 will include an all new Kirin 960 chipset featuring ARM's latest high performance CPU cores, the Cortex-A73.

The Mate 8 launched in November last year, so it's only a matter of time before Huawei decides to official unveil the Mate 9. The phone is set to launch with Android 7.0 on board and a new version of the company's EMUI skin, making this the first major Huawei phone to launch with Noguat pre-installed.