More details on Huawei’s new quad-core mobile chip.

Huawei came out with an early surprise announcement at MWC this week, unveiling a new quad-core chip which will be used in their new smartphones (earlier story here). The K3V2 chip was an unexpected announcement, and along with being used in new Huawei phones it will also be offered for sale to other handset makers, which will provide competition from the quad-core Tegra 3 chip from NVIDIA.

In fact, Huawei officials claim their chip is 30-50% faster than the Tegra 3 across a range of benchmarks. Along with 1.2-1.5Ghz speeds, it features a 64 bit memory bus - twice that of Tegra 3.

The graphics block handles 2-D and 3-D work and helps a handset deliver 35 frames/second video compared to 13 fps for Tegra 3 and 8.4 for a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon, according to Huawei’s tests.

While the K3V2 uses a 40nm manufacturing process, the company already has plans to release a new design in 12 months based on 28nm technology.