Huawei Unveils 7nm HiSilicon Kirin 980 SoC with Dual NPU & Mali-G76 GPU

A day after Honor confirms the upcoming Honor Magic 2 smartphone to come powered by Kirin 980 SoC, Huawei officially unveils the latest HiSilicon chipset at IFA 2018. The HiSilicon Kirin 980 is the world’s first commercial processor to be built on the 7nm FinFET node. Recently, Qualcomm also confirmed the successor to the Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform will also be built on the same 7nm FiNFET node. Both Qualcomm and Huawei are using TSMC’s 7nm process for producing their new-gen flagship chipsets.

Talking about the Kirin 980 SoC, Huawei has confirmed it to feature dual NPU (Neural Processing Units). Last year’s Kirin 970 is the world’s first processor to come with a dedicated NPU. Compared to the 10nm processor, the 7nm process is said to improve the performance by 40% and efficiency by 20%. The Kirin 980 packs a total of 6.9 billion transistors. It is also the first SoC to use the new Cortex-A76 cores and also the Mali G76 GPU. The octa-core chipset packs 2x Cortex-A76 cores @ 2.60 GHz, 2x Cortex-A76 cores @ 1.92 GHz, and 4x Cortex-A55 cores @ 1.80 GHz.

With the higher clock speeds, the Kirin 980 offers better multitasking and smoother user experience along with quicker app launch time. Compared to the Mali G72, the Mali G76 offers 46% greater graphics processing power at 178% improved power efficiency. Coming to the Dual NPU, the Kirin 980 further improves the On-Device AI experience like much faster image recognition capability. The Dual ISP on this SoC is mentioned to provide better support for multi-camera configurations and also the new HDR color reproduction technology.

The Kirin 980 is also first SOC to support 2133MHz LPDDR4X memory. It packs Cat.21 LTE modem that offers speeds up to 1.4Gbps. With all these numbers, the Kirin 980 seems to be a powerhouse. The upcoming Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro smartphones launching in October 16th will be the first set of devices to feature this new Kirin chipset. Stay tuned on PhoneRadar for more details!

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