This will be HiSilicon’s third 16nm SoC that features a total of eight cores. Four of them are Cortex-A73 clocked at 2.4GHz while the last four are optimized for power saving and they are definitely Cortex-A53s clocked at 1.8GHz. Huawei still sticks with the big.LITTLE strategy where only four cores can operate at once. The faster Cortex-A73 cores will actually end up 100 MHz slower than the Cortex-A72 cores from Kirin 955 clocked to 2.5GHz but the CPU performance might end up close due to a optimizations in Cortex-A73 cores.

The new chipset is introducing a DDR4 memory controller capable of LPDDR4-1800 speeds and probably the biggest upgrade comes from a GPU that is now upgraded from ARM Mali-T880MP4 at 900 MHz with Kirin 950 to ARM Mali-G71MP8 at 900 MHz with Kirin 960.

The new GPU helps Kirin 960 to Decode & Encode 2160p30 HEVC and H.264 codecs and decode 2160p60 HEVC. It also supports UFS 2.1 definitely an upgrade compared to eMMC 5.0 support from Kirin 950.

The GPU performance can jump by up to 180 percent even besting the Snapdragon 821 in Manhattan 1080 off-screen score. If you prefer Qualcomm, shed no tears as Kirin 960 competes with soon-to-be announced Snapdragon 830 / 835, a 10nm core that should bring a new Adreno 5x0 in the game.

The new SoC also gets an updated modem with Category 12/13 support and custom CDMA implementation. Bear in mind that Huawei comes from China, a land where CDMA is dominant (Verizon in the USA also uses this technology). It is important to mention that Huawei is a  huge name in carrier infrastructure too.

The Mate 9 uses Quad HD (2,560 x 1,440 pixels) resolution, above mentioned Kirin 960 processors, 6GB RAM and 128GB internal storage. It also comes with a USB Type-C port, fingerprint sensor as well as a 3.5mm audio connector. The Huawei Mate 9 comes with a dual camera setup by Leica with Leica's own 1:2.2/27 ASPH (Aspherical Lens). This denotes that the lens on a phone contains an aspherical lens element. This is something that Huawei has already used on its Huawei P9 phone powered by Kirin 955, launched in April 2016.

Huawei is expected to announce this phone tomorrow, but it looks like Huawei Mate 9 will become the first officially introduced Cortex-A73 powered phone.