Huawei officially unveiled the new generation mobile SoC processor “Kirin 980”

Huawei officially unveiled the new mobile SoC processor “Kirin 980” at the IFA 2018 exhibition in Germany. According to Huawei officials, the Kirin 980 is the industry’s first mobile SoC processor with dual-core NPU. It can realize 4,500 images per minute and supports AI scenes such as face recognition, object recognition, and object detection.

It is reported that Kirin 980 can achieve AI scenes such as face recognition, object recognition, object detection, image segmentation, and intelligent translation under the strong computing power of the dual NPU. It adopts a higher precision deep network and has better performance. Real-time, for a better experience.

Kirin 980 achieves 4,500 images per minute, and the recognition speed is 120% higher than that of the previous generation, which is much higher than the industry’s same level.

The Kirin 980 is equipped with eight CPU cores (four A76 and four A55), ten GPU cores, dual ISP, i8 sensor processor, security engine, UFS 2.1, Wi-Fi audio, and 4K video.

huawei-launches-kirin-980-the-first-commercial-7nm-soc

The following are the six highlights of the Kirin 980 that Huawei officially summarized:

1. Technology: The world’s first commercial TSMC 7nm, integrated 6.9 billion transistors, compared with Kirin 970 performance increased by 20%, energy efficiency increased by 40%.

2. NPU:  The dual-core NPU, AI computing power is 4 times that of the previous generation, supporting a richer AI application scenario; 4,500 images per minute, 120% faster than the previous generation.

3. CPU: The first commercial based on ARM A76 architecture, 75% performance improvement, energy efficiency increased by 58%; new design Kirin CPU subsystem, Flex-scheduling multi-core intelligent scheduling mechanism, 2+2+4 three-speed energy efficiency architecture.

4. GPU: ARM Mali-G76 GPU, performance increased by 46%, energy efficiency increased by 17%.

5. Photography upgrade: New upgraded self-developed ISP 4.0, pixel throughput increased by 46%; video dedicated processing pipeline, video capture delay reduced by 33%.

6. Communication upgrade: It support LTE Cat.12, peak download rate of 1.4Gbps; equipped with Wi-Fi chip Hi1130, support 160MHz bandwidth, support L1 + L5 dual-frequency GPS ultra-precise positioning.

For more info: See Huawei official press release