Huawei's Kirin 920 octa-core platform goes official - is this the Snapdragon 805's Chinese nemesis?

posted by Luis D. / Jun 06, 2014, 3:51 AM

Huawei's Kirin 920 octa-core platform goes official - is this the Snapdragon 805's Chinese nemesis?

Today, Huawei officially made its octa-core Kirin 920 SoC official. Designed to spar with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 805, the chip houses four Cortex-A15 clocked between 1.7 and 2.0GHz, along with four Courtex-A7 cores clocked between 1.3-1.6GHz. A powerful Mali-T628 GPU is in charge of the graphics (check out ARM's page to see what this beast is capable of). The graphics processor supports display resolutions of up to 2560x1600, which leaves little doubt that Huawei is preparing to ride the QHD train.

Other goodies offered by the Kirin 920 include LTE Cat 6 network support with a top download speed of 300Mbps, and VoLTE technology.

Earlier benchmarks showed that Huawei's new chip is pretty much on par with Qualcomm's most powerful piece of silicon for this year - the Snapdragon 805. This is an impressive achievement for an in-house produced chip, especially if Huawei has the important battery endurance part locked down.

The most likely contender to make use of it is the upcoming "Mulan" - a powerhouse of a smartphone with a 4.9-inch 1080p display, 3GB of RAM, and a 5.1-megapixel front camera.

via G For Games

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21 Comments

1. _Bone_

Posts: 2155; Member since: Oct 29, 2012

Competitor to the Snapdragon 800 and Adreno 330 maybe. The Mali-T628 won't be able to touch the Adeno 420, surprised Huawei didn't use the Mali-T720/T760. Well, not that surprised. Huawei SoCs are always about a year too old.

posted on Jun 06, 2014, 4:00 AM 6

5. Ashoaib

Posts: 3282; Member since: Nov 15, 2013

I dont know the performance of Huawei... but I hope it is not like mediatek, which show good results in bench mark but in real time usage it is legendary slow

posted on Jun 06, 2014, 4:34 AM 2

6. brrunopt

Posts: 742; Member since: Aug 15, 2013

Mediatek uses only A7 cores , they achive high scores because of the 8 cores but in real world where most software use just 1 core the performnace wont be great. Huawei is using 4 A7 and 4 A15 , using just one core having A15 cores will bring a huge advantage. You can compare these chips to Samsung's Exynos...

posted on Jun 06, 2014, 4:42 AM 3

14. TheLolGuy

Posts: 483; Member since: Mar 05, 2013

The reason the test scores are great and it's real world performance is crummy is because nothing in real usage scenarios is going to use more than 2 cores for 99.5% of the cases. I'd rather have 2 solid cores taking up the same die space than 8 cores split up so small. When almost everything you do with and will do with your phone for the future will use the maximum of 2 cores, I'd rather have 2 cores that can use up the die space to be powerful. I'm not editing videos or making a pixar movie on the damn thing. At best people are just adding some light filters or some Microsoft WordArt-esque stuff to pictures. The sooner the masses realize this, the better quality experiences we can have with our phones. I doubt this will ever happen though...

posted on Jun 06, 2014, 10:25 AM 0

11. TylerGrunter

Posts: 1544; Member since: Feb 16, 2012

This time they are only 6 months behind. If the MALI-T628 has 6 cores it's an exact copy of the Exynos Octa 5422. But with the added LTE makes a lot of sense. For the GPU it depends how many cores it has and the GPU clock, but it looks like they will use the same config as the Exynos.

posted on Jun 06, 2014, 7:27 AM 0

12. Bondurant

Posts: 781; Member since: Jun 04, 2014

None of the flagships of 2014 are using Snap 805. So how exactly are they 6 months behind if Huawei's 2014 flagships are powered by Kirin 920 ?

posted on Jun 06, 2014, 8:47 AM 0

15. TylerGrunter

Who said anything about Snap805? To start with it will be enough if this chipset is as powerfull as Snap801, and to finish there are several devices using already the Exynos Octa 5422, which seems equivalent to me. Therefore their chip is 6 months later after the ones with the same performance.

posted on Jun 06, 2014, 11:55 AM 0

16. Bondurant

Exynos 5422 was unveiled on February 2014. Samsung S5 was released on April. Huawei says a phone with kirin 920 will be on stores by the end of the month. So not really "6 months" behind. They also plan to release a Kirin 920x in 2014 and by next year a 64bit version of the octo core. Either way, Huawei are the only mobile manufactures besides Apple and Samsung, that produce their own chip. They are there to take on the big dogs.

posted on Jun 06, 2014, 2:04 PM 0

21. TylerGrunter

Point for you, just 4 months, not 6. But that just if you compare with the Exynos 5422, because if you take the 5420 instead (also similar specs) it has been out since August 2013, nearly one year. But please read my comment again, I was not bashing Huawei, just telling _Bone_ that this year they were not that late as the competors don´t have anything much better for the time being.

posted on Jun 07, 2014, 6:51 AM 0

13. UglyFrank

Posts: 2194; Member since: Jan 23, 2014

The t628mp6 performed worse than the 330 so this is closer to the 320

posted on Jun 06, 2014, 9:42 AM 0

18. Arte-8800

Posts: 4562; Member since: Mar 13, 2014

The 330 are clocked 100Mhz extra than the Mali which are clocked at 450Mhz, so it would preform better

posted on Jun 06, 2014, 8:55 PM 0

2. GreekGeek

Posts: 1276; Member since: Mar 22, 2014

Benchmarks are at most, deceptive I'd rather see how it throttle controls cpu/gpu intensive tasks. This is why Nvidia 's Tegra 4 failed, so good at short bursts but comes up short in endurance rating. On my Snapdragon 800 I can play up to more than an hour or two of graphics hungry game without slowing down. I doubt if the Kirin will be able to match the aging SD800' s core per core performance Let's see what the Kirin brings to the table.