With the months old Mate 8 and Nexus 6P behind it, and both the P9 and P9 Plus on the horizon, Huawei is already said to be hard at work on Mate 9. The follow up to its current flagship, the P9 pair, will rock a 20 MP dual camera and a Kirin 960 chipset.
Huawei's next SoC (System on Chip), the Kirin 960, will ditch its predecessors Cortex A72 core in favor of the more recent Artemis cores, though the company will stick with the 16nm process designed by TSMC. The SoC will combine Artemis and Cortex A53 clocks into an octa-core build.
On the other side of that SoC, Huawei is stepping up from the Kirin 950's quad-core Mali-T880 MP4 graphics processing unit to an octa-core GPU. Elsewhere in the upcoming SoC, the Kirin 960 will support CDMA networks and Category 12 LTE speeds.
The alleged details on the Kirin 960 came from mobile industry analyst Pan Jiutang (via Gizmo China), who also asserted that the Mate 9 will sport dual 20 MP rear cameras. The P9 and P9 Plus rock dual 12 MP cameras, so this rumor at least appears to fall in line with Huawei's handset plans.
All of this conflicts with the specs Huawei vendor Gizok has thrown up on its website. For starters, the vendor's listing for the Mate 9 indicates that the smartphone will have a 16 MP rear camera.
The listing also anticipates that the Mate 9 will use architecture that's a lot like that of the P9 series and a lot less like what Jiutang expects from the handset. The Mate 9 will employ a Kirin 955 SoC that has a Mali-T880 MP4 GPU, going by the listing.
Elsewhere in the Mate 9, the phone will have 64 GB of storage space and 4 GB of RAM - along with a memory card slot. The phone will also have a 6-inch display that outputs a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and an 8 MP camera on its face and will run on Android 6.1 Marshmallow, going by the Gizok listing.
