Yesterday, along with a couple of smartphones and a wearable device, China-based Huawei also launched its new processor — Kirin 710, the company’s first processor made using the 12nm design process. Now, the upcoming flagship processor from the company — Kirin 980, is slated to launch at IFA in Berlin in September this year.
The Kirin 980 will be the successor of the Kirin 970 chipset that is currently powering the company’s high-end smartphones. Once launched, the HiSilicon Kirin 980 will be powering flagship and high-end smartphones from Huawei and Honor.
However, at this time, there is no official information available about the Kirin 980 chipset. Earlier, we reported that the Kirin 980 will be manufactured by TSMC and it will be made using the same 7nm process used for Apple’s A12 processor. Further, the chipset will also feature a new Cambrian NPU from Cambricon Technologies.
The new Cambrian AI processor is said to provide 5 trillion calculations per watt and will be available in dual, quad, and octa-core variants depending on the level of AI processing required. The flagship chipset will also have ARM’s core A75 CPU cores but will feature Huawei’s own GPU, a first for the company.
The upcoming Kirin 980 is expected to power Huawei’s Mate 20 series smartphones following its announcement later this year. It is also expected to be powering the next-generation Huawei P-series smartphones. The AnTuTu listing of the Mate 20 Pro reveals what the chipset is capable of, registering a remarkable benchmarking score of 356,819.
Recently, Huawei launched Kirin 710, competing with Qualcomm’s recently launched Snapdragon 710 that is manufactured using the 10nm process. The chipset consists has four Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.2GHz and four Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.7GHz. The GPU, ARM Mali G5, is said to be 1.3 times better than that of the Kirin 659 and 1x more energy efficient.
In terms of performance, the Kirin 710’s single-core performance is said to be 75% higher than that of the Kirin 659 while for multi-core performance, it offers a 68% increase in performance. The image signal processor and digital signal processor have also seen improvements and enhance the performance of the camera in low-light conditions.
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Apart from Kirin 980, the Chinese company is also reportedly working on another chipset — Kirin 1020, which is said to be twice as powerful as the company’s current flagship chipset Kirin 970. As per the reports, it will go into mass production once the first 5G network launches, and will soon after be used in the company’s smartphones.
