Huawei announces 7nm soc Kirin 980 and unveils Mate 20 on October 16

Huawei announced its first 7nm soc for smartphones on Friday, the Kirin 980. The chip is built around ARM’s Cortex-A76 architecture. Huawei will use the chip in its Mate 20, which it will announce on October 16.

Thanks to 7nm production, the Kirin 980 is faster and more economical than the 10nm-produced Kirin 970 and the transition from the Cortex A73 to the A76 architecture provides further improvements, according to Huawei. The Kirin 980 is made up of 6.9 billion transistors, compared to 5.5 billion for the 970. There are a total of eight cores: two A76 cores at 2.6GHz for peak performance, two A76 cores at 1.9GHz for high performance. longer-lasting and four A55 cores at 1.8GHz for more economical modes.

The GPU of the soc is the Mali-G76MP10. With ten cores, the GPU seems smaller than the G72MP12 with twelve cores of the Kirin 970, but according to AnandTech, the cores of the new GPU are much larger and more extensive, with a double number of texture units and render units per core. Huawei states that the GPU is 46 percent faster than its predecessor.

On almost all fronts, the Kirin 980 is better than the Snapdragon 845, claims HiSilicon, the chip division of Huawei that makes the soc. The GPU performance would be on the same level as standard, but with the ‘GPU Turbo’ mode enabled, the Kirin would also surpass the Qualcomm chip here. The Snapdragon 845 is Qualcomm’s current top model for smartphones in its range. This year Qualcomm will announce its own 7nm successor to the 845.

The Kirin 980 gets a Cat 21 lte modem with a maximum download speed of 1.4 Gbit/s. The chip could also handle WiFi speeds of up to 1.7 Gbit/s. The soc also supports lpddr4 2133MHz memory. The manufacturer uses two npus in the soc. Npu stands for neural network processing unit and this part helps with calculations for, among other things, image recognition. With two of the processors on board, the Kirin 980 should be able to detect and track multiple objects in video faster, among other things.

Huawei also announced which smartphones will receive the Kirin 980 first. Those will be the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro, which Huawei will announce on October 16 in London. In addition, the Honor Magic 2, which will be released this year, will also receive the soc.

During the IFA, Huawei officially introduced the Mate 20 Lite. This smartphone with Kirin 770-soc is already for sale and the specifications and prices were already known.