At the Honor 30S launch event held in China today, the manufacturer announced the Kirin 820 5G which is the first mid-range 5G processor from Huawei’s HiSilicon semiconductor arm.
The Kirin 820 5G is a 7nm processor that is touted as an upgraded version of the Kirin 810.
Starting with the CPU, the Kirin 820 5G has 8 cores arranged in a 1+3+4 configuration. There is a prime Cortex-A76 core clocked at 2.36GHz and it is paired with three other Cortex-A76 cores clocked at 2.22GHz. The remaining four cores are Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 1.84GHz.
The Kirin 820 comes with a Mali-G57 GPU with six cores, but the clockspeed wasn’t mentioned. There is also a new feature called Kirin Gaming+ 2.0 that should bring improvements to gaming.
There is 1 Big core for the NPU and a Kirin ISP 5.0 inside the new chipset. The new ISP is 15% more energy-efficient and brings a 30% reduction in image noise with support for BM3D SLR image noise reduction. This is the same ISP used in the Kirin 990.
The Kirin 820 5G is said to offer a 27% improvement in performance compared to the Kirin 810. It also brings a 38% improvement in GPU capabilities. While the new NPU improves AI performance by 73%.
The processor has a built-in modem that supports both SA and NSA networks. It supports 5G dual-mode and five frequency bands – n1, n3, n41, n78, and n79. You can set SIM 1 to 5G while the second SIM slot is set to VoLTE or you can have both SIM slots set to VoLTE.
At the moment, the Honor 30S is still the only phone with a Kirin 820 5G SoC but expect more phones from both Honor and Huawei to launch in the coming weeks and months.
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