Home Tech Chipsets HiSilicon Kirin 960 Review, Specs & Phones

HiSilicon Kirin 960 Review, Specs & Phones

HiSilicon Kirin 960 was produced by Huawei chip maker as an ARM based high-end or mid-range octa-core SoC for mainly smartphones and tablets. It was introduced alongside the Huawei Mate 9 in November 2016.

HiSilicon Kirin 960

The Kirin 960 inhibits upgrades from different aspects such as performance, endurance, photography, audio, communication, security and reliability. It said to have better performance and efficiency than the previous-generation chip with an integrated embedded security engine inSE to make it the world’s first SoC chip with the finance-level security.

Hisilicon Kirin 960 Processor

The Kirin 960 chip is made up of Eight CPU cores, four performance Cortex-A73 cores and four energy efficient Cortex-A53 cores. The Kirin 960 is known to be able to deliver up to about 20-30% increase the performance of four Cortex-A73 cores with a greater energy efficiency.

The performance A-73 cores cluster is clocked up to 2.4 GHz and the four A-53 energy saving cores clocked up to 1.8 GHz. According to it’s manufacturer, there should be improvement in performance by about 20% while the power consumption should be reduced by 20%
as compared to the Kirin 950 and 930 processors.

Also, ARM says the A73 consumes 20%-30% less power than the A72 under same process and same frequency with up to 25% smaller same process, same performance targets.

Huawei went further to say that in its own testing, out of the most popular 14 apps used in China, the Kirin 960 was the fastest to open 13 of them when compared with the competition. It was one of the fastest ARM SoCs in the end of 2016, before the 970 came out.

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h2> Process Technology (nm)

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The Kirin 960 is manufactured in a modern 16-nm process at TSMC. Like most chipset manufacturers, Huawei has made a heavy focus on improving battery life. The Kirin 960 through its 16nm process node offers much better battery life.

HiSilicon Kirin 960 Graphics

HiSilicon has significantly increased the Kirin 960’s peak GPU performance. Not only is the chip first to use ARM’s latest Mali-G71 GPU, but it however doubles core count to eight and peak frequency boosted to 1037MHz offering a 15% higher performance than the 950’s smaller GPU.

The Mali-G71 uses ARM’s new Bifrost microarchitecture, which moves from an SIMD ISA that relied on Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) to a scalar ISA designed to take advantage of Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) like modern desktop GPU architectures from Nvidia and AMD.

There’s no much in depth explanation on difference here, but basically this change allows a better utilization of the shader cores, increasing throughput and performance.

The Mali-G71 MP8 GPU also brings much needed improvements user experience in gaming, with performance of 180% it delivers faster than the previous generation Mali-T880 GPU used inside previous Kirin chipsets.

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h2> Connectivity

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The Kirin 960 also offers Cat 12 LTE downloads and Cat 13 uploads, as well as the widest range of radio frequencies; supporting the spectrum from 330MHz to 3.8GHz and opens up support for a wide range of global carriers. This essentially means your phone should work in every global market.

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h2> Performance

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The Kirin 960 also brings a new Image Signalling Processor (ISP) which boasts advancements for camera capabilities, although this does largely depend on the imaging used in a smartphone.

Benchmarks (AnTuTu)

Over at AnTuTu, specifically on the version 6, the chip reaches a low of 124087, avg of 143408, median of 146044 and max points of 157445.

HiSilicon Kirin 960 Phones

• Huawei Mate 9
• Huawei P10 Plus
• Honor 8 Pro

HiSilicon Kirin 960 Full Specifications

Chipset Details

Series Kirin 960
Codenames Cortex A73, A53
Announced 2016
Released 2016
Number Of Cores 8-Cores
Clock Speed 2400MHz
Process Technology 16nm
CPU Octa-core 2.4GHz
Cores 8-Cores
Bit Architecture 64-bit
GPU (Graphics) ARM Mali-G71 MP8
GPU (Cores) 2-Cores
GPU (Frequency) 900MHz
Memory Speed 1600MHz
==> 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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