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Huawei joins the octa-core club with a high-spec mobile chip of its own

It's been a year since Huawei's Richard Yu's teased his company's octa-core HiSilicon system-on-chip, and according to the exec's recent Sina Weibo post (screenshot after the break), said product is finally ready. In fact, Yu revealed that his company's launched two new 28nm HPM chips. The octa-core model (likely the K3V3) features the usual quad Cortex-A15 plus quad Cortex-A7 big.LITTLE combo (as implemented by Samsung Exynos 5 Octa); and there's also a new quad-core Cortex-A9 model (likely the K3V2 Pro), which succeeds the 40nm K3V2 that features the same architecture. What's unclear is whether the octa-core chip will allow all eight cores to run simultaneously, but what we do know is that both chips come with a multi-mode LTE modem that will also handle both WCDMA and China Mobile's TD-SCDMA radios.

Yu also made a separate post to say we're entering the era of 64-bit octa-core processor (Cortex-A53 plus Cortex-A57) this year, but the message was deleted soon afterwards. What a tease. Anyhow, we have a feeling that Huawei will be showing off its first device powered by its own octa-core chip at MWC next month. That's not to say Huawei's saying goodbye to Qualcomm and MediaTek, though -- Yu confirmed that he'll have more "high-end" devices that will feature chips supplied by these two companies.