We saw a lot of smartphones and other electronic devices being launched at the IFA Berlin, but today, Huawei simply stole the whole show. Yesterday, the company announced its upcoming bezel-less device with a slide-out camera mechanism, the Huawei Magic 2 and today, Huawei launched its all-new flagship processor, the Kirin 980. And yes, this is the world’s first smartphone processor that is built on the TSMC’s 7nm process. Huawei claims that right now, the Kirin 980 is the most powerful and intelligent chipset.
Since this is a 7nm chipset, it is more power efficient and powerful than the 10nm processors like the Snapdragon 845. It is also the first chipset featuring the Cortex-A76 cores. It is worth mentioning that the current best chipset for Android phones, the Snapdragon 845, features the Cortex-A75 cores. So yes, the CPU performance is going to be much better with the Kirin 980 as compared to the Snapdragon 845.
The 980 is an octa-core processor that includes 4x Cortex-A76 (2x High Performance and 2x Power Efficient cores) and 4x Cortex-A55 cores. According to Huawei, there is a ‘Flex-scheduling’ intelligent mechanism that lets the processor use right cores when needed. So, when you’re doing heavy gaming, the high-performance cores will be used, and for tasks like social media and browsing, the low-performance cores will be used. Since the high-performance cores won’t be used for all the processors, the power consumption is reduced.
The Kirin 980 is also the first in the world to feature the Mali-G76 GPU. According to Huawei, the 7nm process ensures 20% better performance & 58% better power efficiency than the last generation, i.e., the Kirin 970. The all-new Mali-G76 GPU results in 46% better performance & 178% better power efficiency than the Kirin 970’s GPU. The Kirin 980 is first to support 2133MHz LPDDR4X RAM.
That’s not it! The Kirin 980 is also the first in the world to feature dual NPUs (Neural Network Processing Units). Due to this, the chipset has a much better AI performance meaning better and faster Face Recognition, Object Recognition, Image Segmentation, and intelligent translation. The image recognition has improved tremendously as the dual NPUs help in achieving 4500 images per minute & hence, the recognition speed increases up to 120%.
Last but not the least, 980 is the world’s first smartphone chipset to feature the LTE Cat.21 that means downlink at 1.4 Gbps and with the Hi1103, the peak download speed goes up to 1.7 Gbps. That is absolutely insane!
Huawei has also confirmed that the Mate 20 series and the Huawei Magic 2 will launch this year with the Kirin 980 processor. The Mate 20 series will be unveiled on October 16 in London.