Huawei today unveiled its next generation Kirin chipset that will power its upcoming flagship handsets, the Kirin 960. Making use of the latest ARM cores and Mali GPU, the Kirin 960 chipset is based on the 16m FinFET fabrication process making it more power efficient than its predecessor.

The octa-core Kirin 960 sports four ARM Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.4GHz along with four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. The GPU performance of Huawei’s Kirin chipsets have always been their Achilles heel, and the company is rectifying that with its latest chipset. Featuring ARM’s Mali-G71 MP8 GPU, the Kirin 960 offers up to 180% faster performance than previous Kirin chip. Support for Vulkan APIs also ensures that CPU overhead is reduced leading to better performance.

Other key features of the Kirin 960 include support for CDMA, Cat 12 LTE, and Cat 13 upload speeds. With support for a wide range of frequencies, the Kirin 960 chipset will work across hundreds of mobile networks across the world. A new ISP is also a part of the Kirin 960 chipset that supports camera sensor with various focal length and delivers image quality that is much closer to what a human eye sees. Other features of the chipset include support for LPDDR4 RAM and support for UFS 2.1 storage.

We should see Huawei make use of its Kirin 960 chipset in its upcoming flagship handsets, including the Mate 9 next month.