At the IFA 2018 in Berlin, Huawei has introduced its next-generation flagship chipset – the Kirin 980. It is the world’s first commercial mobile SoC to be manufactured using TSMC’s 7nm process and is set to power the brand’s upcoming flagships starting with the Huawei Mate 20 series.
According to Huawei, the Kirin 980 is the first chip to feature ARM’s Cortex-A76 CPU and the new Mali-G76 GPU. It is also the first to come with the world’s fastest modem (LTE Cat.21) – which offers up to 1.4Gbps speeds and support the ultra-fast 2,133Mhz LPDDR4X memory.
Compared to previous generation (10nm), the 7nm process promises 20-percent speed improvement and 40-percent more power efficiency. The CPU has an octa-core configuration which includes two Cortex-A76 cores clocked up to 2.6GHz for turbo mode; two Cortex-A76 cores clocked up to 1.92GHz for long-lasting performance and 2x Cortex-A55 cores clocked up to 1.7GHz for power management.
It also comes with a dedicated Dual Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and supports both real-time video and still image recognition. It is also paired with Huawei’s 5G Modem – the Balong 5000.
