Artemis

Last year we had the opportunity to attend HiSilicon's launch event of the Kirin 950. The 950 SoC was the first to employ ARM's Cortex A72 in a smartphone, and the big.LITTLE 4x4 A72/A53 configuration of the 950 powered most of Huawei's flagships for 2016. It also marked a significant jump both in performance as well as efficiency compared to previous Kirin chipsets. The CPU part especially made such a good impression in our review of the Mate 8, and at the time we estimated that it would easily trade blows with Qualcomm and Samsung's own custom ARM microarchitecture designs, Kryo and Exynos M1, in their respective SoCs and flagship smartphones. Ultimately the Kirin 950 exceeded our expectations, in part due to the rather...