The Kirin 670 is Huawei's response to the Snapdragon 636

Huawei's HiSilicon SoCs have come a long way over the past few years. The company released the Kirin 970 towards the end of 2017, with the SoC being the first to feature a dedicated NPU. There's apparently a mid-range version of the Kirin 970 on the way, too—the Kirin 670—and it will also feature an NPU.

The Kirin 670, according to the leak, will feature six cores: two performance Cortex A72 cores and four efficient Cortex A53 cores. Both set of cores will combine in a big.LITTLE configuration. On the graphical side of things, it will feature a Mali-G72 MP4 GPU, which is a less powerful variant of the Mali-G72 MP12 on the Kirin 970. The Kirin 970 will be built on TSMC's 12nm manufacturing process, which should give it a slight edge over rivals like the Snapdragon 636 in the efficiency department.

Going by the listed specifications, we expect the Kirin 670 to put up performance numbers in the same ballpark as the Snapdragon 636 and the new Exynos 7872—about a 50% advantage over the popular Kirin 659 and Snapdragon 625. Of course, it's not an exact science, especially since the clock speeds of the cores are currently unknown.

We'll be sure to keep you updated, though.