Huawei’s Kirin 950 SoC Will Support Cat.10 LTE And 450 Mbps Download Speed
Huawei is one of the few companies to be producing its own chips for its smartphones. The company designs its own Kirin SoCs, which can be found in devices branded Glory or Honor by Huawei, depending on the market. It’s worth noting here, that Samsung uses its own Exynos chipsets in its flagship devices, and Apple has also been designing the Ax chips in-house, which are used in its iPhones and iPads.
One interesting new development is that even Xiaomi is planning to use chips designed in-house in its entry-level Redmi devices, rather than use Qualcomms SoCs, which can be found on its Redmi 1s and Redmi 2 smartphones. The original Redmi used a Mediatek chip, and the Redmi 2A uses a Leadcore chip.
According to leaked promotional material from China Mobile, Huawei’s latest Kirin 950 integrated baseband chip will support LTE Cat.10 specification. As a comparison, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 currently supports LTE Cat.9, and it is only the next generation Snapdragon 820 (integrated MSM9x40 series chips), which will support LTE Cat.10.
In addition, the table also shows the Kirin 940 SoC will support LTE Cat.7. It is this chipset, which is expected to power the upcoming Huawei Glory 7. In addition to Huawei’s Kirin 950, the only other chip makers to have incorporated support for Cat.10 LTE are Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 SoC, Intel’s XMM7360 chips and Samsung Exynos 7 series chipset, which currently powers the company’s Galaxy S6 and S6 edge smartphones.
Cat. 10 wireless modem supports theoretical download speeds of up to 452 Mbps through support of Global Carrier Aggregation (GCA). The modem also supports up to 100 Mbps of upload speeds. The next generation Envelope Tracker also improves power consumption through reduced heat-dissipation, and also through reduced power consumption of the power amplifier.
When Huawei does release its Glory / Honor 7, it will be interesting to compare the performance of the device with its predecessor, the Glory / Honor 6, which came with a HiSilicon Kirin 920 chipset.
