On Wednesday in Beijing, Huawei's HiSilicon introduced its Kirin 950 chipset with more power and improved energy efficiency, positioned to challenge Samsung's Exynos and Qualcomm's Snapdragon offerings. The Kirin 950 is comprised of four ARM Cortex A72 processors running up to 2.53 GHz clock speeds and four 1.8 Ghz lower-power Cortex A53 processors. The chip has been made using TSMC's 16FF+ technology and packs a speedy Mali T880 graphics chip clocked at up to 900MHz as well as a Category 6 LTE modem (up to 300Mbps) as well as sensor package that Huawei calls the i5.

HiSilicon has also implemented cutting-edge and competitive ISP/DSP integrated in the SoC.

The new SoC can now decode HEVC at up to 4K resolution at 30fps, but the encode capabilities have not evolved from the previous generation and thus is limited to 1080p30 H264.

Kirin 950 is the first in the mobile industry to employ a hybrid LPDDR3 / LPDDR4 memory controller.

In terms of power consumption, HiSilicon says the A53's max out at around 200mW while the A72's go up to ~1450mW.

HiSilicon says the chip boost performance by 40 percent over its prior silicon while dropping energy consumption by 60 percent. They also claim that equates to 10 more hours of normal use with a 3500 mAh battery.

The company estimates that the A72 is overall 11% faster clock-for-clock than current A57 designs, so together with the slightly higher clocks we should see the Kirin 950 perform about 20% better than the Exynos 7420 in CPU-bound tasks.