After the release of P8, along with a flurry of other handsets, rising Chinese smartphone star Huawei is already being rumored to have begun the prototype phase on its upcoming flagship smartphone, P9. According to Phone Arena, P9 is expected to feature the company's next generation SoC, Kirin 950. Kirin 950 is going to be running ARM Cortex-A72, a processor that exceeds the capabilities of Cortex-A57 in both performance and energy efficiency. Additionally, the processor is also capable of recording 4K videos at 120 FPS.

With its previously released mobile products, it can be clearly seen that Huawei has omitted Cortex-A57 from the processor equation. This is prudent judgement on Huawei's part, since Cortex-A57 consumes far more battery life in contrast to delivering performance. Cortex-A72 will be supplemented by Cortex-A53, and will be a part of ARM's big.LITTLE architecture. Since it is rumored that P9 is going to sport Kirin 950, the GPU present inside the SoC will be none other than ARM Mali-T880. Similar to Apple's M7 and M8 co-processor, Kirin 950 is also going to feature a co-processor called i7 (not to be confused with Intel's Core-i7 lineup).

It is highly likely that consumers who are waiting anxiously for P9 will not be able to witness the smartphone being announced in 2015. This is because if the handset is indeed sporting Huawei's next-generation chipset, both Kirin 940 and Kirin 950 are going to be announced in Q4, 2015, meaning that the announcement of P9 is going to take place somewhere between Q1 and Q2, 2016.

In addition to Kirin 950, P9 is also expected to be incorporated with a 16 MP rear camera shooter, which will obscure the image snapping and video recording prowess of the 13 MP camera sensor placed on the rear side of P8. Unfortunately, that is all the information present concerning Huawei's upcoming flagship smartphone.

When 2015 nears its end, additional information will be made available.