Very few vendors choose to build their own hardware and systems, and Honor is one of them. Honor is planning to focus on their in-house chipsets starting from Kirin 650 for technology innovation. Many smartphones are using chipsets from Qualcomm and MediaTek and other 3rd-party manufacturers, however, having an in-house chipset is beneficial.
Buying chipsets from third party vendors may reduce costs and efforts for research and development process but it also limits the functionality of various facets. The chipset from other manufacturers may have a set of constraints as well as some fixed capabilities on which the smartphone manufacturer has to rely on and taking things into consideration, they have to make a final product based on what third party vendor offers.
Honor is now leaning towards manufacturing the main components of their homegrown Kirin platform and we are talking about the Kirin 650. It is expected that the new honor smartphone will sport a Kirin 650 chipset. What happens here is it enables the company to incorporate the features and functionality of their in-house chipset without relying on other vendors.
The Kirin 650, successor to the Kirin 620, uses a 16nm manufacturing technology and has 8 cores clocked at 2.0 GHz along with a Mali-T830 MP2 GPU. Furthermore, the chipset supports a dual-SIM LTE Cat6 Modem and LPDDR3 RAM.
Advantages of having Kirin 650 (in-house chipset manufacturing):
Cost Cutting: The major benefit of manufacturing in-house chipset is the cost advantage on a long term basis. With in-house Hi-Silicon Kirin 650 chipsets, Honor can eliminate those margins and thus providing smartphones at a cheaper price.
Better optimization: Having their own chipsets can lead to a better integration between software and hardware and eventually result in a better user experience. Kirin 650 is manufactured on 16nm FinFET plus process from TSMC, hence, it ensures better performance along with less heat. The battery optimization is another aspect that can be achieved using the homegrown chipsets. The Kirin 650 is claimed to be an ultra-power saving CPU. Battery life is one important facet in a smartphone.
Differentiation: As we know, many smartphones uses OEM products, however, having in-house chipsets can be an added advantage and help in differentiating from other manufacturers and stay ahead in the game.
Features of Kirin 650
- Faster CPU: Clocked at 2.0 GHz, the CPU offers lightning-fast performance with its 8 cores.
- big.LITTLE architecture: The Kirin 650 uses ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture ensuring balance performance. The Kirin 650 has four high-performance (big) cores clocked at 2.0 GHz for heavy tasks and four power-efficient cores (LITTLE) clocked at 1.7 GHz for light tasks delivering 65% increase in performance and 40% decrease in power consumption according to Honor.
- Smooth Performance: The Kirin 650 uses fast eMMC 5.1 storage and the new EMUI 4.1 software delivering smooth user experience.
- Gaming: Gaming needs are seamlessly satisfied with the powerful Mali-T830 MP2 GPU. The GPU is 100% increase compared to the previous Kirin 620.
- 16nm Technology: The 16 nm FinFET technology which is seen in the Apple’s A9 chipset as well as the flagship Kirin 950 can be found in the new Kirin 650. It can provide a reduced power consumption and improved performance. Mid-range chipsets like Qualcomm Snapdragon 650 and 652 offers the old 28nm technology while MediaTek uses 20nm – 28nm technology.
There will be an upcoming Honor device using the new Kirin 650 SoC. The smartphone is expected to hold a compact battery having a capacity of 3000 mAh battery (650 Wh/L energy density). Also notable is the fast charger (9V 2A) shipping along with it.
The chipset is made power efficient so, we have compared Kirin 650 vs Qualcomm Snapdragon 820, which one is more power efficient. The chipset can outperform the flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 in some areas.
