As we approach 2020, smartphone companies are gearing up to hit new highs with their smartphones in the new decade. Huawei, which should launch the Mate 40 next year, is expected to power the phone with a new processor rumoured to be called the Kirin 1020 (although other reports claim it might be called the Kirin 1000).
Whatever the naming scheme might be, one thing is for certain, the chipset will bring performance and efficiency improvements over its predecessor, the Kirin 990. While we don’t know exactly how big a gap that will be, a new leak from Slashleaks contributor Teme, who goes by the Twitter handle RODENT590 claims that the difference will be fairly huge.
According to his tweet, the Kirin 1020 will be built on a 5nm EUV process, as compared to the 7nm process used for the Kirin 990. That in itself implies that the new chipset should be considerably faster than the 990, while also being more battery efficient. He also claims that the Kirin 1020 will use the new Cortex-A77 cores (the same ones used in the MediaTek Dimensity 1000) as compared to Cortex-A76 on the Kirin 990, and overall will allow the Kirin 1020 to have a 50% performance improvement over the Kirin 990.
The leaker also claims that the chipset will only be available with a 5G modem. Obviously, the usual leak-rules apply here, and I would suggest that you take this information with a pinch of salt until we get to hear something concrete from more sources, or hopefully, from Huawei itself.
Still, that’s a fairly big leap to make from one generation of a smartphone chipset to another, and if Huawei does pull this off with the Kirin 1020, it could have an extremely powerful chipset on its hands for its flagship phones in 2020. That’s very exciting, at least to me, but what do you think? Let us know in the comments.
