Huawei has announced a new flagship Hisilicon Kirin chipset. The Kirin 985 processor is yet another 5G processor, bringing the total number of 5G SoCs under Huawei’s belt to three. The other two SoCs are the flagship Kirin 990 5G and the mid-range Kirin 820 5G announced recently.
The new Kirin 985 is a flagship processor but isn’t as powerful as the Kirin 990 5G SoC. It is manufactured using TSMC’s 7nm process and integrates a single-chip 5G baseband solution without a plug-in. It supports 2G / 3G / 4G / 5G network standards and NSA / SA 5G dual-modes. The theoretical maximum downlink rate is 1277Mbps and the uplink rate is 173Mbps. In comparison with the Snapdragon 865 processor integrated with Snapdragon X55 modem, the downlink rate is said to be about 40% faster while the uplink rate is about 75% faster.
The new processor is said to be specifically optimized for high-speed scenarios. For example, at a speed of 90 km/h, the downlink rate and uplink rate can still reach 589Mbps and 63Mbps respectively. These are 31% and 37% faster than the downlink and uplink rates of the Snapdragon X55-integrated Snapdragon 865 chipset.
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Furthermore, the Kirn 985 processor has high energy efficiency. Huawei claims that the power consumption under 5G heavy load and light load scenarios is only 504mA and 291mA respectively. Also, the Chinese company claims that the energy efficiency ratio is about 1.5 times that of the Snapdragon X55-integrated Snapdragon 865 chipset.
In terms of the architecture, the Kirin 985 integrates an Octa-core CPU, which is made up of a single large core, three medium cores, and four small cores. Although Huawei didn’t announce details of the cores, the AI benchmark listing has shown that the Kirin 985 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. It also integrates an octa-core Mali-G77 GPU as well as a dual-core NPU AI unit and ISP 5.0 image unit, similar to what is found on the Kirin 990.
According to the official announcement, Kirin 985 is sufficient for 5G network performance, dual-SIM 5G use. The processor also features 5G anti-jamming capability, 5G low latency, 5G energy efficiency, and 5G high-speed scene performance.
The Honor 30 Standard Edition which was announced today happens to be the first smartphone powered by the Kirin 990 processor. The higher Honor 30 Pro and 30 Pro+ both utilise a Kirin 990 SoC. Huawei is also tipped to use the chipset on the Nova 7.
