Huawei to launch Kirin 980 based phone in India on October 16
Huawei unveils industry’s first 7nm chipset- Kirin 980 in India
Huawei Consumer Business Group India has unveiled the Kirin 980, its new chipset which is the world’s first commercial SOC manufactured with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturer Company’s (TSMC) 7nm process and Dual NPU Al processing power. The chipset will be commercially available on Huawei devices by Q4 in India.
The company is expected to launch the Huawei Mate 20, featuring this chipset, on October 16th in India.
Compared to the previous generation 10nm process, the 7nm process packs 6.9 billion transistors in the same form factor as its predecessor, while delivering 20% improved performance and 40% more efficiency.
The launch of the Kirin 980 represents another step towards an era of truly intelligent smartphones. While the Kirin 970 was the first SOC that came with a dedicated Al processor, the Kirin 980 is the industry’s first mobile SOC to be equipped with two neural processing units (NPUs). The Dual-NPU setup affords greater Al processing power, which allows developers to create even richer Al experiences without having to lean on the cloud.
“At Huawei, we want to create an elite mobile ecosystem and offer products that not only offer distinctive user experience but also enhance the way consumer connects with each other. Being a pioneer in AI last year, we are thrilled to launch the Kirin 980 equipped with the industry’s first dual NPU,” said Brody Ji, Senior Product Director, Huawei Consumer Business Group.
“We do not take Kirin as a business; We use it as a competition capability chipset. Many people are very interested to buy the Kirin chipset, but it is our strategy,” said Brody Ji, when asked if the chipset would become available on phones manufactured by other companies.
“By developing the core technologies of chips and the cloud, Huawei is focused on delivering the user experiences that define the future of the smartphone in the smart era,” he added.
According to industry reports, Huawei took its place as the number two global smartphone manufacturer, shipping more than 95 million phones globally
Huawei has integrated the Cortex-A76 and Mali-G76 — two new introductions that were never before seen in other SoCs — into the Kirin 980. The new A76 cores feature vastly improved performance and efficiency, up by 75 percent and 58 percent respectively. Huawei also developed new Kirin CPU subsystem based on the multi-core architecture to further enhance the SOC’s performance and efficiency. Focused on providing an ultimate performance, the Mali-G76 embedded within Kirin 980 delivers 46 percent more graphics processing power and 178 percent better power efficiency as compared to previous generations.
With Dual-NPU, the Kirin 980 elevates the On-Device AI experience with greater processing power and intelligence.
Leveraging the Dual-NPU On-Device AI processing capability, Kirin 980 provides an even more exquisite, real-time user experience in areas such as facial recognition, object recognition, object detection, image segmentation, AI translation, and more. Kirin 980 can recognize up to 4,500 images per minute, which is a 120% increase from its predecessor and greater than the industry average. Kirin 980 also supports multi-person motion prediction, which accurately reads the motion of human subjects at up 30fps and can rig their 3D model real time.
Kirin 980 also features an AI clock boosting technology which can intelligently identify the performance bottlenecks by reading the frame rate, frame time, user input and processor workload, and adjust accordingly in real time. The technology works particularly well with games, comparing with the traditional way of prediction, it works 30 percent better than conventional solutions in predicting the resource utilization of games.
Kirin 980 is the world’s first SOC to sport a modem that supports LTE Category 21 (which supports a downlink of 1.4Gbps). Additionally, the Kirin 980 supports carrier aggregation, even across frequency bands, so users are free to choose their mobile operators and still enjoy the same premium
The Kirin 980 is equipped with the Hi1103 Wi-Fi module, which is ‘the world’s fastest Wi-Fi’ as well as the ‘world’s first to support a maximum download speed of 1.7GBPS’. It supports dual-frequency (Ll and 15) GPS for ultra-precise positioning, providing 10 times greater accuracy.
