The Huawei P6S has been shrouded in a bit of mystery. Not much is known, but the company president did say it would come with an octa-core processor. Since then, we’ve seen information here and there refuting that, but nothing official. ARM has taken to Chinese bloging site Weibo to quietly answer our questions about the processing power of the Ascend P6S.
The new Huawei smartphone will have a quad-core Cortex A9 processor from ARM, as well as the new quad-core Mali 450 GPU. Like Samsung, Huawei buds their own processors under the Hisilicon brand, with this tandem being named the Hisilicon Kirin910. No word on specs yet, but we assume it’ll use the popular 28nm process for the chipset.
ARM was more interested in talking gaming than benchmarks, though. The blog post centered almost entirely around the gaming performance of the Mali GPU, which ARM promises will be “prefectly smooth.” We don’t think it’ll be a world beater, but we’ll keep an open mind until we get to see it for ourselves.
This probably won’t be in the same class as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 we see on many top-end Android devices, as the Kirin910 said to be right around 1.6GHz. It’s also hard to believe it will outrun Apple’s A7 and M7 coprocessors, but we’re not counting it out just yet. If nothing more, it shows that strong performance doesn’t have to come from incumbent manufacturers, and we like the parity this provides.
