Between October last year and now, Huawei‘s Hisilicon chip department has released two high-end chipsets. The flagship Kirin 990 SoC which was used on the Mate 30 series and of late the P40 series. The foundry has also unveiled the Kirin 820 premium mid-range chipset that found its way into the Honor 30S first. The Chinese market leader has now revealed that another high-end chipset – Kirin 985 is in the works and it has earlier been tipped to roll out onboard the premium Honor 30.
The Kirin 985 first popped up in the rumour mills as far back as December 2018 and it was speculated to launch with last year’s Huawei P30. One of the rumours tipped that Kirin 985 to launch in the second half of 2019 and another leak hinted that it will be mass-produced by TSMC in Q2 2019. The mass production was later rumoured to commence in Q3 2019. The Kirin 985’s pathway didn’t pan out exactly as the rumours predicted but apparently there is some bit of truth in the rumours. Honor’s Business department vice-president has now confirmed the existence of the Kirin 985. Since it is coming from the Honor end, we may as well conclude the chipset will feature on the Honor 30 first.
In a Weibo post today, the Honor VP shared the latest AI benchmark ranking with the Kirin 985 in the third spot. The chipset has ahead of it, only the Kirin 990 which is in the first spot and the MediaTek Dimensity 1000 in the second spot. The Kirin 985 is raked ahead of notable 5G chipsets like the Kirin 800 chipset in the third spot, the non-5G Kirin 990 variant in fifth while the premium mid-range Dimensity 1000L is at the sixth position in terms of AI prowess.
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The Snapdragon 865 flagship SoC is ranked at number 8 while the SNapdragon 855 Plus sits at the 9th spot. A surprising inclusion is the Unisoc Tiger 710 which completes the top 10. Samsung’s Exynos 990 chipset is at the eleventh position.
The Hoor VOP extols the capability of the company’s self-developed Neural Processing Unit (NPU) which is responsible for the impressive performance of the four Huawei chipset on the list, including the Kirin 985.
The screenshot shows the Kirin 985 is far below the Kirin 990 but is apparently a better SoC than the Kirin 820. However, the chipset is an octa-core processor with the same cores as the Kirin 820. It features a single Cortex-A76 core clocked at 2.58GHz and three Cortex-A76 cores with clocking frequencies of 2.4GHz each. There are also four Cortex-A55 cores with lower clock frequency of 1.84GHz. The Kirin 985 is listed as equipped with dual-core DaVinci NPU whereas the Kirn 820 has a single-core DaVinci NPU. Thus, the 985 has a slightly improved performance over the Kirin 820.
The Honor 30 series is expected to be launched on April 15.
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