This will be the chipset that powers their next flagship
Huawei has officially taken the wraps off of their next generation flagship processor, the Kirin 980. Huawei is one of the few phone manufacturers in the world that produces their own processors, which has increasingly become a necessity for Chinese companies thanks to the US government’s escalating hostility to Chinese firms. IFA in Berlin is starting to become the traditional launchpad for Huawei to announce their next-generation flagship processor, which is destined to arrive in their upcoming Mate 20.
The Kirin 980 is the world’s first processor built on the 7nm process, and is the world’s first to implement ARM’s new Cortex A76 CPU, the first with a dual NPU, the first with Mali’s new G76 graphics chip, the first with a super fast 1.4Gbps Category 21 modem and the first to support the faster, 2133MHz LPDDR4X RAM standard.
That’s quite a list of firsts, but for a company like Huawei who is fast becoming one of the biggest names in the smartphone world today. The Kirin 980’s 7nm lithography is impressive because it requires incredibly precise manufacturing techniques to perfect, but the end result is a processor that has a 75% performance boost and a 58% power efficiency improvement over the previous generation Kirin 970.
The phone also uses an interesting octa-core arrangement, and instead of the usual big.LITTLE setup from previous years where the processing load was split between two quad-core segments, there’s now a four little cores handling low-power tasks, a dual-core that handles mid-range duties while heavy processor-intensive tasks are handled by the two big cores.
We won’t have to wait long until the Kirin 980 sees action – Huawei has made no secret about the fact that it’ll be powering their upcoming flagship, the Mate 20, when it’s officially unveiled in London on the 16th of October.
