Huawei's Mate 9 and the Kirin 960

In line with expectations, HiSilicon has gone ahead and detailed their new flagship SoC, the Kirin 960, ahead of the November 3 Mate 9 unveiling by Huawei. Disappointment at Huawei's stance towards the developer community not withtaken, the Kirin 960 should be a SoC capable of outpacing the Exynos 8890 and Snapdragon 821, briefly holding the Android processor crown until the E8895 and S830 see the light of day.



The Kirin 960 is built using the same 16nm FinFET TSMC process as the 955 and 950, but promises a significant increase in performance and efficiency by incorporating four Cortex-A73 CPU cores and eight Bifrost GPU (Mali-G71) cores. Moreover, it houses a LTE Cat. 12/13 modem, supports UFS 2.1, and has a new ISP – hopefully meaning future Huawei and Honor flagships will be able to shoot 4K video. Perhaps the biggest advancement stems from HiSilicon's decision to double the GPU core count, aiding the performance increase of 180% over the Kirin 950. While prior Kirin SoCs have been right up there with the best of them CPU-wise, HiSilicon traditionally favoured yield over GPU prowess. In comparison, the Exynos 8890 still holds four more cores (T880 MP12), so it will be interesting to see if Samsung will keep the tally unchanged when they also use the supposedly 1.8-times-faster-than-T880 G71 cores in their own E8895.



Moving on to the Mate 9, it is subject to a lot of rumours. Most include the aforementioned SoC, 4 GB or 6 GB RAM, 64, 128 or 256 GB ROM, dual Leica-branded cameras with a ƒ/2.0 20MP and 12MP setup, a 5.9/6.0-inch 1080p IPS display, a 4000 mAh battery with SuperCharge ( lab: 1500 mAh in 5 minutes), rear-facing fingerprint sensor, USB Type-C, EMUI 5 (Android Nougat), and prices ranging from $510 - $705 depending on storage and memory configuration. A fresh rumour also states that two codenames, Manhatten and Long Island, both pertain to the Mate 9, with the latter being a dual-curve screen variant (provided render looks like a shopped Note 7). The use of a 1080p LCD display would follow Huawei's tradition, used for its lower native-resolution rendering workload. On the other hand, Huawei's CEO Richard Yu told The Wall Street Journal that they'd have a Daydream-ready phone by this autumn, making QHD a strong possibility. Back in April, Yu also noted in a post on Weibo that Huawei would adopt QHD due to VR. Perhaps the Chinese giant will do as Xiaomi is rumoured to do with their upcoming Mi Note 2 – adopt curved QHD AMOLED panels from LG? Is anyone else eager to see what Huawei has in store for us on November 3, especially now that the king of phablets, Samsung's Note 7, is no more?



Kirin 960 chipset announced: much faster GPU, better power use (GSMArena)
Latest rumored specs of the Huawei Mate 9 surface (Phone Arena)
New Huawei Mate 9 photos reveal curved and regular variants of the phone (Phone Arena)

 

If Huawei wanted to move on the US market, now would be the time to do it. Partly because of the Note 7 debacle, and partly because many Android enthusiasts are saying that the Huawei Nexus 6P was a better total package than its Google Pixel XL successor.

 

Indeed, there are not as many 5.7+-inch competitors as one would expect this time of the year. I thought the Mate 8 was also a strong competitor at the time, offering very strong CPU performance in an attractive package. Ultimately, I decided against it for the lack of QHD (multiwindow operation & VR), lack of stock Android ROMs, and the GPU falling way short of the competition, but when I saw it in real life, I kind of regretted it. Very premium-looking phone.

 

First camera samples are out. Unfortunately, they're heavily compressed and downsampled as they were uploaded to Weibo. Looks like there's more low-light noise than the S7 would produce, but it's hard to tell without a direct comparison. Dynamic range looks good.

http://www.gizmochina.com/2016/11/02/huawei-mate-9-camera-samples-released/

 

Now that the 5.9-inch FHD LCD Mate 9 and 5.5-inch QHD AMOLED Mate 9 Porsche Design have launched, GSMArena has an early hands-on article, which includes benchmarks and camera samples. Despite the narrower aperture, the duo seems to offer some pretty good shooting capabilities, rich in detail. HDR looks more washed out than on the Pixels though.

It will be interesting to see if EMUI 5.0's implementation of machine learning to optimize responsiveness and efficiency is more than Huawei using a buzzword. The Mate 9 scores significantly higher in GeekBench and Basemark than Snapdragon phones, but scores alarmingly low in GPU scenarios considering the cores it's packing. If that's merely a symptom of non-final software or not remains to be seen. Since next year's Krin 960/965 P-series will also have to fend off Snapdragon 830 competitors, it would be embarrassing if they really are that weak.

The Mate 9 PD could be one of the very best phones this year, if you can afford it. 4000 mAh on a 5.5-incher certainly sounds like a recipe for success, and the regular 5.9-inch Mate 9 can already do 20 hours of continuous video playback.

http://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_mate_9_handson-review-1516p3.php