Recently, Huawei released a new generation of mobile phone chips, the Kirin 960, at an autumn media conference. Before the press conference, the media exposed the invitation letter of Huawei Kirin Autumn Media Communication. According to the public information, Huawei's Kirin 960 has six characteristics: performance, endurance, camera, audio, signal, and security. So are the six characteristics of Kirin 960? Most famous? What are the advantages and disadvantages compared with Qualcomm Snapdragon 830, Samsung Exynos 8895, and MediaTek Helio X30?
| Huawei Unicorn 960 improvements and featuresIn terms of performance, the Unicorn 960's CPU is a quad-core 1.8G ARM Cortex A53 and quad-core 2.4G ARM Cortex A73, and the GPU is Mali G71 MP8. Huawei has purchased the ARM Cortex-A73 CPU core integrated into the Unicorn 960, which is also the world's first The integrated mobile phone chip of Cortex A73. On the GPU, Huawei changed its conservative and ambiguous strategy. It purchased the latest Mali G71 from ARM to replace the Mali T880 of the Kirin 950 and increased the number of cores from 4 to 8. According to the Huawei PPT, the Unicorn 960 GPU Performance goes beyond Qualcomm Snapdragon 821.
(Huawei announced PPT, GPU performance is better than Xiaolong 821)
In terms of battery life, camera, signal, audio, and security, Unicorn 960 has made a lot of improvements.
For example, Huawei claimed that the MicroChip I6 can reduce power consumption by 40% in some scenarios. In the AR game scenario, the battery life can be doubled. Another example is Huawei's use of a more powerful ISP, so that it has a better photographic effect. Another example is Huawei's independently developed baseband that supports four-carrier aggregation, peak download speeds of up to 600Mbps, and support for CDMA networks.
In audio, Huawei's Hi6403 can significantly improve call quality in noisy environments. For an endless number of telecom frauds, Unicorn 960's anti-counterfeiting base station technology can try to cut off the fraudulent calls and spam messages that pseudo-base stations may bring from the source.
| In the manufacturing process, Qualcomm Snapdragon 830 leads Huawei Unicorn 960According to foreign media news, a chip called MSM8998 is expected to debut in the first quarter of 2017. Whether MSM8998 will be named Qualcomm 830 has yet to be confirmed by Qualcomm officials.
According to the current news, the MSM8998 uses a 10nm FinFET process, with 4GB DDR4X memory and 64GB UFS storage. It is only recently that Samsung has announced that it has mastered the 10nm manufacturing process. Qualcomm Xiaolong 830 is likely to be available only after half a year to meet consumers. According to the grapevine (Lei Feng Net (public number: Lei Feng network) Note: Not Dahui teacher's " history ") said that MSM8998 will still use Qualcomm developed Kyro core. Although there are rumors that Qualcomm 830 will be an 8-core SOC, Qualcomm Xiaolong 830 or Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, like Qualcomm 820, will still be a quad-core processor, according to Qualcomm's partners.
Since Qualcomm has not announced the specific parameters of the Xiaolong 830 so far, it does not compare the CPU and GPU performance. However, it is now clear that the Xiaolong 830 adopts the Samsung 10nm manufacturing process and is superior to the Unicorn 960 in the manufacturing process. 16nm—Although Samsung has more water in the manufacturing process than TSMC, Samsung's 14nm is inferior to TSMC's 16nm, but Samsung's 10nm manufacturing process is better than TSMC's 16nm manufacturing process.
The disadvantage of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 830 is that the release time is about 1-2 quarters later than the Unicorn 960, and Huawei can take the initiative. However, the market share of Qualcomm Xiaolong 830 is still larger than Huawei Qilin 960, which is only produced and sold. Samsung, LG, ZTE, Backgammon, Xiaomi, HTC, Sony, Lenovo, and other Android flagship phones are likely to use the chip. .
| Samsung Exynos 8895, how do they compare to MediaTek Helio X30?MediaTek Helio X30 will follow the Helio X20's ten-core architecture, with the addition of the low-power A35, which is the ten-core architecture of the 2A72+4A53+4A35. Two A72s will go straight to the 2.8GHz, A53 and A35 clocks. It will also directly increase to 2.2GHz and 2.0GHz. At the same time, the Helio X30 will support up to 8GB of LPDDR4 flash memory and support the UFS 2.1 standard. According to the situation of X20, a 10-core architecture may not be able to save power, but because there are two A72s with a frequency up to 2.8G, the performance of the X30 is obviously sufficient, while Mali, who gave up the ARM on the GPU, chose Imagination instead. PowerVR has won some auras for the X30, adding weight to its impact on high-end mobile phone chips.
Samsung's Exynos 8895 will continue Exynos 8890's design on the CPU, but the main frequency will be raised to 3G, in extreme cases can be upgraded to 4G. The Mali-G71 with ARM will be installed on the GPU.
From a CPU point of view, according to Huawei's announcement of PPT, Kirin 960 has a limited increase in CPU performance compared to Kirin 950. Therefore, Cortex A73 has relatively limited performance relative to Cortex A72. It is very likely that A73's improvement lies in better performance. Power consumption ratio, therefore, in terms of single-threaded performance of the CPU, the 2.4G A73 of the Huawei Unicorn 960 may lose to the A72 of the 2.8G. Samsung mentioned the cat's main frequency to 3G and even 4G. This approach will achieve better performance on one hand. It can overpower Kirin 960 and Helio X30 in single-thread performance, but it will also bring greater performance. Consumption, it depends on whether Samsung's 10nm can withstand it. Of course, in terms of CPU performance, the three mobile phone SOCs have excess performance for most scenarios.
According to the GPU, according to Huawei's PPT, the GPU performance of the Unicorn 960 is better than that of the Qualcomm Xiaolong 821. As for the GPU performance, it is better than Exynos 8895 and Helio X30. Considering that there are no Exynos 8895 and Helio X30 SOCs at present. The GPU's official news, for the time being, does not make a comparison.
In the manufacturing process, Helio X30 uses TSMC's 10nm manufacturing process. Exynos 8895 uses Samsung's 10nm manufacturing process. In terms of manufacturing processes, the Helio X30 is superior to the Exynos 8895, and the Exynos 8895 is superior to the Unicorn 960.
In general, Kirin 960 lost the Helio X30 and Exynos 8895 in the first place due to its inferior manufacturing process. However, according to the X20 situation, the 10-core architecture may not be able to save power, and Samsung's approach to raise the CPU clock speed to 3-4G is too aggressive, plus Samsung has had an excessive amount of material on the GPU, I guess, although Kirin 960 will suffer losses in power consumption due to its manufacturing process, but the power consumption of the Unicorn 960 is not necessarily much larger than the Helio X30 and Exynos 8895.
| ConclusionCompared to the Kirin 950's huge advancement of the Kirin 930 - replacing the A53 on the CPU with the A72, replacing the 28nm manufacturing process with a 16nm manufacturing process. Huawei Unicorn 960 For Kirin 950, except for the skyrocketing performance on GPUs and baseband support for CDMA networks, other aspects of the upgrade are relatively limited .
The significance of the Kirin 960 is more to make up for the existing shortcomings of the Kirin 950 and to serve Huawei's development strategy in terminal products. According to the past situation of Hassling Unicorn chips, although the Kirin series chips are not the best in terms of performance at the same time, they do a better balance of performance and power consumption. It is believed that the Huawei Mate9 and other models equipped with the Kirin 960 will have a better performance. Good user experience.