Huawei was the first to launch a mobile chipset with an integrated Neural Network Processing Unit when the company announced Kirin 970 last year. We saw this processor powering phones like the Huawei Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro last year, as well as all the 2018’s flagships from Huawei and Honor. The company has already started working on the Kirin 970’s successor, and we are getting a lot of Kirin 980’s rumors lately.
To end all these rumors, Huawei officially confirmed that the company is indeed working on the 7nm Kirin 980 processor and it will power the 2018’s Mate 20 series. Based on the 7nm TSMC process, it is said that this is going to result in a 20% increase in performance and 40% less power usage than the last generation. The Kirin 970 has an integrated NPU, and the Kirin 980 is coming with the next generation of that NPU. This means a better AI performance.
As per some rumors, the octa-core chipset is coming with the 4x Cortex-A77 + 4x Cortex-A55 configuration. Keep in mind that the Cortex-A77 is still no announced by ARM. There is a Mali-G72 MP24 GPU that comes with twice the number of cores than the Mali-G72 MP12, which we have on the Kirin 970 at the moment. Still, these are just the rumored specifications, and there is no official word from Huawei yet.
Talking about the announcement of Kirin 980, we are expecting that Huawei will announce it at the IFA 2018 in Berlin since the Kirin 970 was also announced at the same event last year.