Huawei announces Kirin 990-soc with 5g modem

Huawei has announced the Kirin 990 at IFA. The soc differs from the Kirin 980 with higher clock speeds and the integration of a 5G modem, although there will also be a variant that contains a 4G modem. The Kirin 990 has a significantly modified neural processing unit.

The architecture of the Kirin 990 is broadly unchanged from that of the Kirin 980. There are still two powerful Cortex A76 cores, two lower clocked A76 cores and four frugal A55 variants. However, the clock speeds are higher.

With the 4G variant of the Kirin 990, the clock speeds of the less powerful cores are slightly lower than those of the 5G variant. This is probably because the 4g variant is manufactured on a 7nm and the 5g version on TSMC’s 7+nm process. This last optimized node allows for more efficient chips with higher clock speeds.

The integrated 5g modem supports sub-6GHz networks but not 5g based on mmWave frequencies. However, the modem can handle networks on both the non-standalone and standalone architecture. The maximum download speed is 2300Mbit/s. The 4g version of the Kirin 990 has a modem that supports 5x carrier aggregation and offers a download speed of 1600Mbit/s.

The GPU is the Mali-G76 with sixteen cores, while the Kirin 980 has ten cores. This is probably partly why the soc is larger in size than its predecessor. Furthermore, the soc supports the ufs 3.0 storage announced at the beginning of last year, which offers greater bandwidth than ufs 2.1.

HiSilicon, the chip design division of Huawei, has significantly changed the neural processing unit compared to the previous chips. The npu handles computations in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, such as for object and facial recognition. For this, the Kirin 990 uses the DaVinci architecture, which now consists of a small energy-efficient core and, in the 5G version, two more powerful cores. With the 4g Kirin 990 this is a single powerful core. The Kirin 990 socs will probably end up in Huawei’s upcoming Mate 30 smartphones, which Huawei will present in two weeks.

Soc Kirin 990 5g Kirin 990 4g Kirin 980 Kirin 970