Huawei announced its new flagship smartphone processor, the Kirin 980 SoC, based on the 7nm production process and the world's first chip to embed Arm's new Cortex-A76 based cores.
The company claimed the new chip, set to debut in sub-brand Honor's Magic 2 flagship, also unveiled at IFA in Berlin, delivers a 20 percent improvement in performance compared to its Kirin 970 predecessor and 40 percent better power efficiency.
In terms of connectivity, the Kirin 980 is the world's first modem to support LTE Cat 21 with a peak download speed of 1.4Gbps.
Huawei said the new chip, which builds on the 970's AI capabilties, features a new, three-level architecture consisting of two super-big cores based on Cortex-A76, two big cores based on Cortex-A76, and four little cores based on the lower power Cortex-A55 CPU.
In comparison with traditional big.LITTLE microchip designs featuring an equal number of high-power and high-efficiency cores, Huawei claimed that the tripartite design and higher clocks speeds of the 980 enable quicker app launch times, better multi-tasking and a generally smoother user experience.
The new Kirin, which contains 6.9 billion transistors within a 1cm2 die size, 60 percent more than the 970, also marks the debut of the new, gaming-orientated Mali-G76 GPU,which offers 46 percent greater graphics-processing power and a 178 percent improvement in power efficiency over the previous generation.
The G76 also features a clock-boosting process that uses AI to identify gaming workloads and adjust resource allocation for optimal performance.
The Kirin 980 features an updated, dual version of the neural processing unit (NPU) first incorporated in the 970 to aid the SoC with AI image recognition, allowing it to recognize up to 4,500 images per minute, up 120 percent from the previous model. It also includes a suite of tools to help developers tap the processing power of the dual NPU.
The new image signal processor (ISP) in the Kirin 980 provides a 46 percent increase in data throughput compared to the 970, according to Huawei, and improved noise reduction in low-light scenarios as well as support for new HDR colour reproduction processes that can manipulate picture contrast to highlight objects on various parts of an image.
As well as powering the Honor Magic 2, the new chip is set to feature in Huawei's next Mate series device, scheduled for launch in October. An early 'lite' version of the Mate 20 will be available already from 10 September, featuring a 6.3-inch screen and double cameras on the front and back.
Huawei's main rivals in the smartphone processor market, Samsung and Qualcomm, expect to launch chips based on the 7nm process in the second half of 2018 and early 2019 respectively.
