Details of the Kirin 970 surface on Weibo

MediaTek look set to announce the launches of their new Helio P23 and Helio P30 mid-range SoCs but competitors HiSilicon are on course for something a bit grander, with the flagship Kirin 970 being closer to launch than ever. Details of the SoC surfaced on Weibo earlier on, revealing impressive features. Nothing ground-breaking, though, but we'll have to wait till we handle it on an actual device.

The Kirin 970 is built by TSMC on a 10nm manufacturing process, much like the Helio X30 and Snapdragon 835. It's a 64-bit octa-core processor, with four Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.8GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores with unknown clock speeds. The SoC is aided by a Mali-G72 MP8 GPU, and supports LPDDR4 memory with a maximum clock speed of 1866 MHz. Connectivity-wise, it supports Bluetooth 4.2, Cat.12, and Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac.

The Kirin 970 is the first entry in the next generation of Android SoCs, and it will be interesting to see how it affects the successors to the Snapdragon 835 and Helio X30, especially considering the fact that the Kirin 960, when properly optimized, is very much a match for the Snapdragon 835. 

We'll be seeing the Kirin 970 on the upcoming Huawei Mate 10, though, so we won't have to wait for much longer.