Huawei unveils Kirin 970-soc with ‘ai chip’

Huawei has announced that it will officially unveil its new smartphones Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro in October. The company also said that it will use the new Kirin 970-soc, which would include features for artificial intelligence.

Huawei CEO Richard Yu made this known in a presentation at the IFA fair, Reuters news agency reports. According to Yu, the two new smartphones will receive the self-developed Kirin 970-soc, which has smart algorithms on board. Huawei itself describes this as real-time artificial intelligence, with which the soc can, among other things, divide tasks and memory in a smart way, render graphics and process camera images.

The Kirin 970 does this with the so-called neural processing unit, or npu. According to Huawei, the smart software allows this chip to perform tasks that normally require multiple chips. This should also allow for a more compact design.

During his presentation, Yu promised that the new Kirin 970-soc offers better performance than the products of Apple and Samsung, without mentioning specific models. The battery life would also give improvements of up to 50 percent, but again no reference model was mentioned. Due to the lack of benchmarks, Huawei’s claims cannot yet be validated.

Yu didn’t reveal much about the hardware used for the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro, except for the Kirin 970-soc. This will probably follow during the official unveiling, which Huawei has planned on October 16. According to rumors, both devices will have a screen with very thin edges. The Mate 10 will probably get 64GB of storage space, 6GB of ram, runs on Android 7.0 and will be equipped with a battery with a capacity of 4000mAh.