Never heard of Huawei?  Well you will going forward.  The Chinese telecommunications company that claims 110,000 employees, 46% of which are planted in R&D departments, is entering in the market to compete against Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, NVIDIA and others by building an ARM-based SoC for its own mobile devices.

Details are limited for now though we expect to hear more as Mobile World Congress progresses but here is what we know.  The Huawei K3V2 CPU will be a quad-core Cortex A9 part with "16 GPUs" – though we don’t have any reference what is meant by "a GPU".  The A9s will run at either 1.2 GHz or 1.5 GHz and Huawei does mention that these will have 64-bit support a 64-bit memory controller as compared to the 32-bit controller on Tegra 3.

The company did have some performance claims that put the K3V2 ahead of the Galaxy Nexus (Exynos 3110) and ASUS Transformer Prime (Tegra 3).  If you believe in marketing slides the new Huawei CPU will be about twice as fast in GPU performance and 49% faster in purely CPU-based tests while using 30% less power.  Man, if we had a dollar for every time someone claimed these kinds of gains…

Photo from TheVerge.com

Hopefully we’ll see some tests on this new SoC soon in the form of the Huawei Ascend D quad phone available this year.