Multiple reports have claimed that the 7nm Kirin 980 SoC will be featuring ARM Cortex A77 CPU cores for performance coupled with Cortex A77 CPU cores for reliability. However, since well-known industry insiders such as Roland Quandt and Ice Universe have claimed that such reports are fake since Cortex A77 has not been announced yet. Today, GizmoChina has received an official confirmation from ARM that the Kirin 980 will be equipped with Cortex A76 and the “Cortex A77 does not exist.” This piece of information debunks all rumors that have claimed the Cortex A77 may get unveiled at IFA 2018 and it will end up inside Kirin 980.
In June, ARM had announced the Cortex A76 CPU as the successor for the Cortex A75. In comparison to its predecessor, the Cortex A76 promises 35 percent improvement in performance and offers 40 percent better power efficiency. And also, it delivers up to 4 times the existing performance in Machine Learning.
The HiSilicon Kirin 970 chipset that was announced in September 2017 now powers more than 10 smartphones by Huawei. The Kirin 970 includes quad-core Cortex A73 CPU and quad-core Cortex A53 CPU. It also features Mali-G72 graphics and an AI NPU unit.
Huawei has recently rolled out a press release that the upcoming Mate 20 series will feature Kirin 980, but it did not confirm anything on its specifications. The press release also discussed that rumors are claiming that the Kirin 980 will be equipped with quad-core Cortex A76 CPU and quad-core Cortex A55 CPU. The SoC is expected to produce maximum clocking speeds of 2.8 GHz. The 7nm Kirin 980 will be soon rivaled by Apple A12 SoC that will be fueling the upcoming iPhones in September and 7nm Snapdragon 855 by Qualcomm that is rumored to go official by December.
The specifications of the Kirin 980 will be revealed at the end of this month through its official unveil event at IFA 2018 in Berlin, Germany. The Kirin 980 will be based on 7nm manufacturing process of TSMC. The SoC is also expected to arrive with an enhanced NPU unit for managing AI tasks. The Kirin 980 powered Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro will be debuting in October.
