Huawei is new to smartphone processor making field but progressing like a hell. At IFA Berlin Huwai has launched the first 7nm SoC or System-on-a-chip Kirin 980. Kirin 980 not only fast 7nm mobile processor but also first in many internal specifications. Kirin 980 is the first Soc to use ARM’s Cortex-A76 CPU and Mali-G76 GPU. It is first SoC having Cat.21 smartphone modem which is capable to use high-speed internet up to 1.4Gbps. Kirin 980 is the first Mobile CPU to support 2133MHz LPDDR4X RAM. Under the hood Kirin 980 6.9billion transistor and its not larger than a thumbnail.
According to Huawei the blue map of Kirin 980 was started three years ago. After an enormous engineering process with the help of more than 1000 senior semiconductor design experts, Kirin 980 is launched. Surprisingly the result is great with about 20 per cent speed increase and a 40 per cent reduction in power consumption in respect to Huawei’s previous generation Soc.
If we compare Kirin 980 with current flagship mobile processor Snapdragon 845 then Kirin 980 has 20% better bandwidth and 22% lower latency than the Snapdragon 845. What it actually means that Kirin 980 will open an app faster than Snapdragon 845 also better experience with 22% more frame rate than Snapdragon 845.
In terms of camera performance, there is a big role of the CPU as the CPU process the information captured by the camera sensor. Here Kirin 980 has new dual ISP (image signal processor) making is 46% faster to process an image comparing to its predecessor. As its a 7nm processor you will realize that Kirin 980 has improved battery performance by up to 23% while recording a video.
To improve the AI performance Huawei has equipped Kirin 980 with a dual NPU (neural processor unit). This will allow image recognition job at a speed of 4500 images per minute. Where Snapdragon 845 and Apple’s A11 do this job at 2371imges/ minute and 1458 images/ minute respectively. Not only image capture but Kirin 980 smartphone will have the world fastest wifi speed up to 1,732Mbps.
After all the features and performance by Kirin 980 let’s check the internal architecture of Kirin 980. It has 8 cores, 2 ARM Cortex-A76 cores for turbo boost performance clocked at 2.6Ghz. Another two ARM Cortex-A76 cores for long-term performance clocked at 1.92Ghz and last four ARM Cortex-A55 cores for background job improving battery backup clocked at 1.8 GHz. Kirin 980 has Mali-G76 MP10 GPU having frequency 720 MHz (489.6 GFlops).
So we are waiting for the first phone with this beast CPU engine. According to Huawei the Mate 20 and Honor Magic 2 will be launching soon with Kirin 980 Soc.