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Huawei Kirin 930 chip could deliver epic battery life

Huawei has offered more details about the upcoming Kirin 930 chipset, which is due to land in several of the company’s 2015 devices.

The Kirin 930, which is a custom-built Huawei chip, is expected to ship with the upcoming flagship Ascend P8, as well as the MediaPad X2 tablet.

To build up hype for the devices, the Chinese company has revealed that the Kirin 930 will use a new, reworked version of the Cortex A53 processor cores.

The existing Cortex A53 designs were originally developed by ARM, and are used across most of the industry’s mobile chips, including Qualcomm’s Snapdragon series and Samsung’s Exynos.

Huawei plans to use a modified version of the design though, dubbing the new cores ‘Cortex A53E’.

Related: Best Android Smartphones 2015

The Kirin 930 will lay its cores out in ARM’s big.LITTLE arrangement. This means that four A53E cores will handle the high-performance processing, while four standard A53 cores will deal with more casual tasks.

The A53E cores will also be clocked at 2.0GHz, which is likely to be significantly higher than the clock-rate we’ll see on the vanilla A53 cores in the Kirin 930.

Huawei made a point of explaining why it didn’t delegate high-performance tasks to the more powerful Cortex A57 processor designs, which are the current go-to flagship cores in the mobile chip sector.

The main reason was, according to Huawei, battery life. While the Cortex A57 cores are 56 per cent more powerful than Cortex A53 cores, they drain battery at 256 per cent the rate.

This means we’ll likely see impressive longevity from Huawei’s upcoming devices. That’s not surprising, as the Ascend P7 also boasted healthy battery life.

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