Huawei today officially announced the Mate 40 series and alongside, the Hisilicon Kirin 9000 5G SoC which powers the new flagship models was also unveiled. Huawei equally unveiled the Kirin 9000E, both chipset built on TSMC’s 5nm architecture.

The Kirin 9000 Series is a 5G chip design with the capability to handle intensive computations and multi-tasking operations with ease. The chip is the most sophisticated 5nm 5G SoC available, delivering vastly improved performance and power efficiency over its predecessor. It takes over from the Kirin 990 5G built on a 7nm silicon.

The new processor is said to have more than 15.3 billion transistors, the first processor to break the 15 billion transistors mark. This makes it the densest and most full-featured 5G SoC to date. The powerful processor packs a three-level power efficiency architecture with cores running at clock frequencies of up to 3.13GHz. The CPU part has eight cores, including a 3.13GHz Cortex-A77 large core, three Cortex-A77 medium cores each clocked at 2.54GHz. The SoC also has four Cortex-A55 small cores clocked at 2.04GHz each. The base frequency of the chipset is slightly higher than that of the Snapdragon 865 Plus which is clocked at 3.1GHz. Thus, Kirin 9000 is currently the highest frequency mobile phone processor.

Also integrated into the SoC is a 24-core Mali-G78 GPU, as well as an innovative NPU featuring two big cores and one tiny core, taking on-device AI to a new level. The 24-core Mali-G78 GPU is touted to be the most powerful GPU ever seen on a Huawei device. This delivers advanced graphics performance and is complemented by an amazing audiovisual experience for immersive gaming. The architecture exceeds the Kirin 990’s Mali-G76 in that the number of cores is increased by half and the performance is upgraded by 60% over the Mali-G76.

In terms of 5G, the industry’s first four-network synergy technology can efficiently integrate Wi-Fi 2.4GHz, Wi-Fi 5Ghz, main card 5G, and secondary card 4G, bringing aggregated high network speed, stable low time under changing network conditions, network optimization or concurrent download.

On its part, the Kirin 9000E GPU cores drop to 22. In terms of CPU architecture, both Kirin 9000 and Kirin 9000E adopt 8-core designs, which are a 3.13GHz Cortex-A77 super core, three 2.54GHz Cortex-A77 large cores, and four 2.05GHz Cortex-A55 energy efficiency cores.

In terms of GPU, Kirin 9000E is a 22-core Mali-G78. In terms of NPU, Kirin 9000E has dual cores (large core and one small core). In other respects, the two chipsets seem to be the same, including the integration of Balong 5000 5G baseband, ISP 6.0, security module, etc. In addition, they are all manufactured with 5nm EUV process, support LPDDR5/4X memory and UFS flash memory, support HiFi sound quality, 4K HDR video, etc.

UP NEXT: POCO C3 for Rs 7,499 (~$102) brings 6.53-inch display, Helio G35, 13MP triple cameras and 5,000mAh battery

The post Huawei unveils the Kirin 9000 & Kirin 9000E chipsets, its first 5G-integrated 5nm SoCs appeared first on Gizmochina.