Huawei confirms Kirin 960 chipset for the Mate 9

Surprising absolutely no one, Huawei has today confirmed that the Mate 9 phablet will be powered by its Kirin 960 chipset. The SoC was officially unveiled at an event last week. The Mate 9 will be announced in Munich on November 3, which is next Thursday.

The company has been putting out teasers for the Mate 9 left and right, confirming the fact that the aforementioned event is for a Mate series device. And today its official Twitter account posted the short video you can see below, complete with the hashtag #aStepAhead. That's the hashtag Huawei's been using for every post related to its November 3 event, so things are pretty clear.

Introducing the Kirin960… A new level of innovation coming to a pocket near you. #aStepAhead pic.twitter.com/plxXJqwAEg

— Huawei Mobile (@HuaweiMobile) October 26, 2016

The Kirin 960 brings much anticipated GPU performance improvements compared to its predecessors, which is great to see because that area was always the biggest weak spot for Huawei's in-house chipsets before. This will no longer be the case with the 960, which employs ARM's Mali-G71 GPU, the newest and top of the line offering from the British design house. The Kirin 960 also has eight GPU cores, up from four in the 950 family.

Those things add up to 180% better graphics performance compared to the Kirin 950, as you can see in Huawei's promo. The CPU side, now having Cortex-A73 cores instead of Cortex-A72, also gets an improvement, but a less ground-breaking 18% only. Finally, the Kirin 960 supports double data speeds compared to the 950, which should come in handy if your carrier has a superfast LTE network.

The Mate 9 might cost up to a whopping $1,300 in its most high-end iteration. It should have 4 or 6GB of RAM, 64, 128, or 256GB of storage, a Leica-branded dual rear camera with 4x optical zoom, and a 5.9-inch touchscreen. This will be 1080p in the base model, whereas the Mate 9 Pro will reportedly have a curved QHD panel.

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