Huawei Mate 8 Debuts With Powerful Kirin 950 Chipset

Huawei has officially launched the Mate 8, the successor to the Mate 7, bringing its latest in-house chipset, the Kirin 950, which benchmarks show outperforms several upcoming high-end processors from Qualcomm and Exynos.

The Mate 8 features a 6-inch FullHD IPS LCD display with a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels, delivering a sharp 367 ppi density. The display covers 95% of the NTSC color gamut for vibrant colors and is protected by 2.5D curved diamond-cut glass. With an impressive 83% screen-to-body ratio, the device offers an immersive viewing experience.

At its heart lies the HiSilicon Kirin 950 system on a chip, built on TSMC’s 16 nm FinFET process. This octa-core processor uses a big.LITTLE architecture, with four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at up to 1.8GHz for efficiency and four Cortex-A72 cores running at 2.3GHz for performance. While the Mali-T880 MP4 GPU at 900MHz is considered midrange compared to next-gen options like the Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890, the Kirin 950 includes an i5 intelligent coprocessor similar to Apple’s A8 SoC, supporting features such as speech recognition, low-power MP3 playback, sensor hub functions, and fused location provider navigation to reduce location-based power consumption.

Constructed from aerospace-grade aluminum, the Mate 8 offers a premium feel and comes in four color options: Champagne Gold, Moonlight Silver, Space Gray, and Mocha Brown. The rear camera is a 16-megapixel Sony IMX298 unit with a f/2.0 aperture lens, optical image stabilization, phase detection autofocus, 4K video recording, and a dual-tone LED flash. An 8-megapixel camera handles selfies and video calls.

Huawei claims the Kirin 950’s efficient cores will extend the 4000mAh battery life by 30% compared to the Mate 7. The phone also supports fast charging at up to 18W (9V/2A), capable of reaching 37% charge in just 30 minutes. The Mate 8 is offered in three storage variants: 3GB RAM with 32GB storage, 4GB RAM with 64GB storage, and 4GB RAM with 128GB storage, all supporting expandable memory up to 128GB via microSD.

The Huawei Mate 8 is now available in Nepal for NPR 80,000.