The much-awaited smartphone exhibition, IFA 2019, is right around the corner. Phone makers have started teasing the new devices they will launch in Berlin, Germany at the event. After LG and Nokia, Huawei has now confirmed its presence at the event and revealed that it will unveil the next iteration of its flagship chipset, the HiSilicon Kirin 990.
Kirin 990 SoC will be manufactured by Huawei-owned HiSilicon and will be produced on TSMC’s 7nm EUV process (similar to the recently launched Exynos 9825 chipset) which means transistor density 20% higher than its predecessor. It also translates to improved power efficiency.
If you’re wondering if the chipset will be based on the ARM architecture or not, well, it is going to feature the Cortex A77 CPU cores and Mali G-77 GPU. Huawei will have licensed the same prior to its blacklisting and it’s the latest from ARM, so it only makes sense for the Chinese giant to adopt it on their upcoming chipset. This will be paired with Huawei’s dual-NPU and AI technology, enabling support for 4K/60fps video recording for the first time on a Kirin chipset.
The teaser video above doesn’t give away any of the features of the Kirin 990, except for the fact that the chipset may come integrated with a 5G modem. Yeah, most of the chipsets we have seen support 5G in 2019 are ones where a standard modem is replaced with a 5G one. Kirin 990 may support 5G out-of-the-box, integrated with the chipset and that’s great.
As is always the case, Huawei’s new Mate flagship will be the first smartphone from the company to be powered by the Kirin 990 chipset. So, Huawei Mate 30 Pro will launch in September with this chipset in tow, possibly along with their Mate X foldable, which has recently also been rumored to be powered by the Kirin 990.
