The HiSilicon Kirin 955 is a ARM-based high-end Octa-Core-SoC for Android based smartphones and tablets. It was announced in the beginning of 2016 together with the Huawei P9. It contains 8 processor cores (4x Cortex-A72, 4x Cortex-A53), a ARM Mali T880 MP4 GPU (see for information and benchmarks), a dual-channel LPDDR4 memory controller and a LTE Cat. 5 radio. In the beginning of 2016 it is one of the fastest ARM bases SoCs on the market. Compared to the slightly older Kirin 950, the 955 is a higher clocked version (A72 cores clock at 2.5 versus 2.3 GHz).
The Kirin 955 is one of the first SoCs that use the new Cortex-A72 architecture. Compared to the A57 cores, the A72 ones offer a 15 percent higher per MHz performance and should be more energy efficient. In the Kirin 955, the four Cortex-A72 cores are able to clock up to 2.5 GHz. Furthermore, the processor includes four power saving cores based on the Cortex-A53 architecture that are clocked with 1.8 GHz (max.).
The Kirin 955 is manufactured in 16nm at TSMC (16FF+ process).