Huawei’s new high performance Diamond series phone uses the new HiSilicon K3V2 Quad-core 40nm ARM Cortex-A9, with 64bit latest/fastest DDR2-for-smartphone memory bandwidth, they claim it has the worlds fastest ARM performance. Here’s an interview with the chief architect on the processor. I try to ask him about the performance, memory bandwidth, GPU, processor design. The K3V2 is made at the TSMC foundry. He has a team of about 500 processor engineers working for him in Shanghai to design this processor. He claims HiSilicon’s cache coherent interconnect design makes it superior to designs such as Tegra3, HiSilicon does not need that “companion core” as they claim to have designed the Quad-core in “the correct way”. HiSilicon has a GPU design partner which I have not heard them mention who it might be. In 6-12 months, HiSilicon is likely to release an ARM Cortex-A15 design on 28nm and also to upgrade their ARM Cortex-A9 designs to 28nm “when 28nm is ready”, for now, he says that the 28nm process manufacturing has too much leakage.
