Home Tech Chipsets HiSilicon Kirin 955 Review, Specifications & Phones

HiSilicon Kirin 955 Review, Specifications & Phones

HiSilicon Kirin 955 is an ARM-based high-end Octa-Core-SoC for Android based smartphones and tablet was announced in the beginning of 2016 alongside the Huawei P9. It is a slightly upgraded version and direct successor of the Kirin 950 that powers the company’s other smartphones like the Huawei Mate 8, and the predecessor to the Kirin 960. Let’s take a look at what this chip has to offer.

Process Technology (nm)

The Huawei P9 is one of few Android flagships that doesn’t use a Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC. Instead, Huawei has opted for their home-grown HiSilicon Kirin 955, which is a high-end chip built using a 16nm FinFET process node.

HiSilicon Kirin 955 Processor

HiSilicon Kirin 955

The Kirin 955 is one of the first SoCs to use the new Cortex-A72 architecture. Cortex-A72 is an evolution on Cortex-A57, it was ARM’s previous high-end ARMv8-A CPU core design.

Announced way back in early 2015, the A72 is stated by ARM to be about 15-30% faster than the A57 on a clock for clock basis, with an improved power efficiency.

In the Kirin 955, the big.LITTLE combination of four Cortex-A72 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores, delivers clock speeds set at 2.5 GHz and 1.8 GHz respectively. This is typically a design that sees the A72 cores used for high performance workloads, while the A53s are included for energy efficiency.

The only major change compared to HiSilcon’s previous flagship SoC, the Kirin 950, is a 200 MHz clock speed increase for the A72 cores.

Interesting to note is that Qualcomm uses the same Cortex A72 in their Snapdragon 650 series designs, but it’s not expected to be as fast as the Qualcomm’s custom Kryo cores.

HiSilicon Kirin 955 Graphics

On the GPU side, there’s an ARM Mali-T880 MP4 GPU clocked at 900 MHz. This is actually the same GPU that is used in Samsung’s flagship Exynos 8890 used in some variants of the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, although Samsung opted for a 12-core design to better support 1440p displays.

Performance

The Kirin 955 utilizes four-core configuration but its 250 MHz higher clock speed should offset some of the performance loss from using fewer compute cores.

There’s also a 64-bit dual-channel LPDDR3/ LPDDR4 hybrid controller that provides 25.6 GB/s of bandwidth. Although, the model of P9 that you buy determines what amount of RAM and RAM technology that you’ll receive. Devices with 32GB of storage gets a 3GB of LPDDR3 memory, while 64GB models get a 4GB of LPDDR4 memory.

Benchmarks (AnTuTu)

Over at AnTuTu, specifically on the version 6, the chip reaches a low of 95743, avg of 97078, median of 97078 and max points of 98413.

HiSilicon Kirin 955 Phones

• Huawei P9
• Huawei P9 Plus

HiSilicon Kirin 955 Full Specifications

Chipset Details

Series Kirin 955
Codenames Cortex A73, A53
Announced 2016
Released 2016
Number Of Cores 8-Cores
Clock Speed 2500MHz
Process Technology 16nm
CPU Octa-core 2.5GHz
Cores 8-Cores
Bit Architecture 64-bit
GPU (Graphics) ARM Mali-T880 MP4
GPU (Cores) 2-Cores
GPU (Frequency) 900MHz
Memory Speed 3200MHz
==> Disclaimer: Specifications, features shown for this chipset was inserted manually. We cannot guarantee that the info on this page is 100% correct. If you think that any information of this particular chipset is wrong or missing, please don’t hesitate to Contact Us.

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