Huawei’s IFA 2018 keynote has begun, and the first thing that they’ve announced is the Kirin 980.
The Kirin 980 processor is the company’s latest flagship, based on the 7nm architecture, making it the first of its kind. The processor is built around ARM’s Cortex-A76 CPU and Mali-G76 GPU, the first with a Cat.21 smartphone modem supporting speeds up to 1.4Gbps, and the first chip to support 2,133MHz LPDDR4X RAM.
The company has compared its latest chipset with the Snapdragon 845, and according to their testing, the Kirin 980 beats the 845 outrightly. In terms of memory, the Kirin 980 has 20 percent better bandwidth and 22 percent lower latency than the Snapdragon 845, which translates into faster app launches across the full range of the world’s most popular apps. In gaming apps, the 980 has been shown to produce 22 percent higher frame rates than the 845, and its power consumption is said to be 32 percent lower.
As for photography, Huawei has gone all out and added a dual NPU (neural processor unit) to the Kirin 980, which performs AI-assisted image recognition tasks at a rate of 4,500 images per minute. In comparison, the Snapdragon 845 reaches 2,371 and Apple’s A11 gets only 1,458. Additionally, by using a new dual ISP (image signal processor), the Kirin 980 is 46 percent faster at camera processing than its predecessor, with a related 23 percent improvement in power efficiency while recording, and 33 percent improvement in latency.
What’s more is that the Kirin 980 will offer the world’s fastest smartphone Wi-Fi speed, clocking in at 1,732Mbps, which is substantially higher than the Snapdragon 845’s best of 866Mbps with a Qualcomm modem or 1083Mbps with a third-party modem.
The company also stated that their upcoming flagship, the Mate 20, will be the first device to feature the Kirin 980 SoC, with a release date set for 16th October in London.
