Instead of featuring four Cortex-A57 and four Cortex A-53 cores, the new Kirin 930 SoC has eight A53 cores with a twist. This comes as a surprise, as the chip was originally rumoured to have four big A57 cores, although the choice of an underpowered Mali-T628 MP4 GPU. 

So what exactly did Huawei do?

Instead of using big cores, it uses four slightly tweaked A53E cores running at up to 2.0GHz. These are backed by standard A53 cores running at up to 1.2GHz.

The company explained that the use of Cortex-A57 cores would result in a 265% increase in power consumption, while yielding a modest 56% performance uplift. In other words, it deemed the Cortex-A57 simply wasn’t worth it. This also explains why Huawei emphasised battery life in Ascend P8 teasers.

The Kirin 930 is a 16nm part, but this does not mean Huawei is willing to sacrifice precious die acreage. The company pointed out that a cluster of four A53 cores takes up just 8.4mm2, while clusters of A57 and A72 cores take up a die area of 20.7mm2 and 18.7mm2.

This probably sounds familiar

In case all this sounds familiar, the approach does resemble the Qualcomm Snapdragon 615, which also features 2x4 Cortex-A53 cores at different clocks. Huawei’s chip sports somewhat faster A53E cores, though. MediaTek’s MT675x is another competitor, although it uses eight identical cores clocked at 1.7GHz.

It should be noted that this is not Huawei’s first Cortex-A53 octa-core. The 28nm Kirin 610 employs eight Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.2GHz and is designed for mid-range devices.

This does not mean that we won’t see any Huawei HiSilicon parts based on big ARM cores. The upcoming Kirin 940 and Kirin 950 are expected to feature four Cortex-A72 cores clocked at 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz respectively. They will be backed by four A53 cores.

These chips will start sampling in Q3 and Q4. The use of A72 cores opens up another possibility – both of them will support LPDDR4 memory.