At IFA 2018, Huawei Business Group announced the upcoming flagship processor, the Kirin 980. The Kirin 980 will be manufactured on the 7nm process and will come with CPU, GPU and dual NPU on board. The presence of dual NPU will speed up the phones usage pattern by the user and also will increase the AI processing power. The processor packs 6.9 billion transistors within a 1cm2 die size, up by 1.6 times from the previous generation. Compared to the 10nm process, the 7nm process delivers 20 percent improved System-on-Chip (SoC) performance and 40 percent improved SoC efficiency.
The Kirin 980 is also the first SoC to embed Cortex-A76 cores. This makes it 75 percent more powerful and 58 percent more efficient compared to their previous generation. Besides this, Huawei will use a new Flex-Scheduling technology that will allocate right cores for right tasks. For instance, high-performance cores will handle immediate intensive workloads, high-efficiency cores will handle sustained performance and so on.
For graphics, the Kirin 980 will feature Mali-676 GPU that offers 46 percent better graphics processing power and is more energy efficient. In terms of Image Signal Processor (ISP), Huawei has integrated its proprietary fourth generation ISP that provides 46 percent increase in data throughput and features all new HDR reproduction technology. For better connectivity, Huawei has integrated the world’s first modem supporting LTE Cat.21 with a peak download speed of 1.4Gbps. Additionally, the Kirin 980 supports carrier aggregation.
The first phone to be powered with the Kirin 980 processor will be the Honor Magic 2, that was revealed at IFA 2018.
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