Huawei announced the next-gen powerful World’s first ever 7nm mobile processor called Kirin 980 HIAI SoC in Berlin at IFA 2018 event. It’s the successor 2nd generation chipset of Kirin 970 SoC and the most advanced and powerful flagship chipset by Huawei. However, Qualcomm and Apple will also launch their flagship powerful mobile platform chip by the end of this year and the expected processor names will be Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 and Apple A12 chip. The existing and current Kirin 970 SoC is available on Mate 10, P20, P20 Pro, and Honor Play, Honor 10, and Honor View 10 smartphones.
Huawei Kirin 980 CPU Architecture Process
The Huawei Kirin 980 is packed with a whopping 6.9 billion transistors, that’s 1.6 times more than the Kirin 970 chip. So it’s capable in 40 percent energy reduction and 20 percent improvement in speed. The octa-core architecture SoC working in a tr-cluster management with 2.6GHz×2 Cortex-A76 of high-performance cores, 1.92GHz×2 Cortex-A76 of middle cores, and 1.8GHz×4 Cortex-A55 of efficiency cores.
At IFA 2018 Huawei also mentioned that Mali G76 MP10 GPU is also powerful in terms of performance around 48 percent and 178 percent in power management. The Kirin 980 can provide better bandwidth up to 20 percent and the low latency up to 22 percent than the Snapdragon 845.
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The Feature Highlights of Huawei Kirin 980 SoC
- World’s First Cortex-A76 based CPU – Up to 2.6GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A76 + up to 1.9 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A76 + up to 1.8GHz ARM Cortex A55, i8 co-processor
- World’s First ARM Mali-G76 MP10 GPU at 720 MHz
- World’s First TSMC 7nm process
- World’s First SoC Supports 4x 16-bit LPDDR4X RAM at 2133MHz
- World’s First SoC featured a Dual Neural Processing Unit (NPU)
- Dual ISP with 46% increase in performance
- Video: HDR10; 4K video @60fps decoding, 4K video @30fps encoding
- Security Engine on Device-AI with Semi-Conductor Process Tech
- World’s First 1.4Gbps Cat.21 Modem
- Integrated Multi-mode 4G/4.5G LTE Modem – Category 21 modem FDD/TDD for downloads (up to 1.4 Gbps), 4 x 4 MIMO, 5CC CA, 256QAM; 200 Mbps downloads, 2×2 MIMO, 1x20MHz CA, 256-QAM
- 5G ready with Balong 5000 Modem
- Increased Wi-Fi speed in compared to Snapdragon 845 chip
- Supports common AI frameworks like Caffee, Tensorflow, and Tensorflow Lite etc.
- Support high Gaming performance with GPU Turbo
The CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group, Richard Yu, said at the launch event –
[su_quote]”Equipped with all-new CPU, GPU, and Dual-NPU, the Kirin 980 is the ultimate engine to power the next-generation productivity and entertainment applications. The all-around features and AI capabilities will bring the raw performance to the customers.”[/su_quote]
The dual-NPU system can recognize up to 4,600 images per minute and that’s up to 120 percent more than the previous Kirin 970 SoC. The Kirin 980 will make the first appearance on October 16 this year with Huawei Mate 20 series smartphones in London. The Huawei’s sub-brand Honor teased a keynote recently that the Honor Magic 2 handset will also debut with Kirin 980 HIAI SoC.