Leading the way: Huawei will unveil its AI-powered Mate 10 on October 16
In September, Huawei introduced the world’s first Kirin AI processor — Kirin 970 — and on October 16, the first smartphone to feature this chipset — the HUAWEI Mate 10 — will launch in Munich.
What makes Kirin 970 unique? We integrated a Neural Network Processing Unit (NPU) into its architecture. The development of Kirin 970 is a result of Huawei’s intense focus on improving user experience through market research, product innovation, and advancements in technology.
Today, it’s difficult to achieve innovative breakthroughs in the information technology. To increase the computing speed and performance, we created 14nm and 10nm processors. We even have 7nm processors. But does this mean we can increase efficiency, reduce power consumption, and achieve better performance by putting more transistors on a silicon chip? If we continue to solve our problems this way, we’ll eventually face a size and performance bottleneck. What we truly need is a technology revolution. A breakthrough.
Huawei’s Kirin 970 uses 10nm manufacturing processes with more transistors and more cores. We’re excited that this is the world’s first chipset integrated with a dedicated NPU, delivering dramatically better AI performance than a CPU and GPU combined.
As we enter the age of intelligence, AI is no longer a virtual concept but something that intertwines with our daily life. AI can enhance user experience, provide valuable services and improve product performance.
Dedicated NPU to process AI commands
We know consumers also want powerful performance. At Huawei, we use AI to achieve this objective and are excited to present the world’s first smartphone that uses a dedicated NPU to handle AI processing.
Additionally, Huawei’s Kirin 970 is 50 times more efficient in power consumption and 25 times faster compared with four Cortex-A73 cores when running the same AI commands. The chipset can improve smartphone performance in image recognition, audio interaction, and photography dramatically, providing our customers an enhanced user experience on all fronts.
Smart image recognition
The Kirin 970 chipset helps users with the tricky issue of night photography, instantly recognizing night-time scenes and adjusting to deliver vastly superior images. In addition, the Kirin 970 is preloaded with a facial detection hardware module, which can recognize complicated facial features such as skin tone, eye color and faces obscured by objects. Using facial detection, it can optimize the photography experience and produce more authentic and natural portraits in terms of facial lighting, color adjustment and focus.
For example, people love to capture the best moments in their lives with cameras. However, poor lighting — among many things — can impact the quality of the shots. With Kirin 970, a smartphone camera can automatically identify backgrounds and objects, as well as perform high speed optimization to produce the best photos possible under any condition, making each shot beautiful with brighter and more vivid details.
The AI-powered Kirin 970 raises the bar of smartphone photography from the stage of “visible” and “clear” to “intelligent.” With AI, the chipset enables smartphones to sense the real world and identify the surrounding environment, human faces and objects.
High-res audio: AI noise reduction makes completely different sound quality
The Kirin 970 supports sampling rates up to 32bit@384K while maintaining original audio details. The chipset’s AI noise reduction technology and machine learning algorithm can effectively control noises and amplify audio signals such as improving audio quality while driving.
The unknown area is the most promising area
With AI technology, we believe the smartphone experience can be something beyond our imagination.
We created the Kirin 970 as an open, mobile AI computing platform for developers and partners. It supports multi-application modes and machine learning frameworks, allowing developers to make use of the powerful AI computing capabilities of the Kirin 970 to develop innovative applications with brand new user experiences.
We believe that Huawei’s open platform can attract a great many developers to build incredible AI mobile applications for consumers in the near future.
