Huawei unveils Kirin 980 chip for upcoming Mate 20 smartphone

Kirin 980

At IFA 2018 in Berlin, Huawei unveiled the new Kirin 980 chipset that will power the upcoming Huawei Mate 20 smartphone.

It’s the world’s first 7 nanometer chip and contains a total of 6.9 billion transistors! Huawei says it performs better than the Snapdragon 845 while consuming less battery power.

Kirin 980 CPU and GPU

The Kirin 980 has an octa core CPU. Two cores are for high performance applications, another two handles demanding applications that also require a longevity and the last four CPU cores are used for non-demanding applications and processes.

Meanwhile, its graphics processor promises 46% improved performance compared to its predecessor.

Dual Neural Processing Unit

The Kirin 980 alo comes with an improved on-device AI processor, a Dual Neural Processing Unit or NPU. On way to test this is by counting the number of images that the chip can recognize per minute.

Apple’s A11 chip can complete 1,458 image recognition tasks per minute while the Snapdragon 845 can recognize 2,371 images per minute. On the other hand, the Kirin 980 boasts up to 4,500 AI image recognition tasks per minute!

Huawei Mate 20 Series

The first smartphone to be powered by the Kirin 980 is the upcoming Huawei Mate 20 and its Pro variant.

A launch date for the two devices has been set on October 16, 2018.

Kirin 980 Chipset specs

• Octa Core CPU (2 x 2.6GHz Cortex-A76, 2 x 1.92GHz Cortex-A76 and 4 x 1.8GHz Cortex-A55)
• 7 Nanometer Lithography Process
• ARM Mali-G76 750MHz GPU
• Supports LPDDR4X RAM
• Dual Neural Processing Unit (NPU)
• Dual Image Signal Processor (ISP)
• 4G LTE Cat21 Connectivity
• Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac (Dual Band)
• Bluetooth 4.2
• NFC
• A-GPS

Source: Huawei