Huawei announces HiSilicon Kirin 980 SoC

Huawei has announced its latest SoC, the all-new HiSilicon Kirin 980. The Kirin 980 is the successor of Kirin 970. The Kirin 980 comes with massive upgrades that haven’t been seen in any other chipset to date.

Huawei revealed the Kirin 980 SoC at an event called Knowledge-core that took place in China. Huawei’s representative highlighted the clock speeds of all the eight cores of Kirin 980.  The Kirin 980 makes the use of three clusters. Each cluster has its own clock speed. There are 2 x Cortex-A76 cores clocked at 2.6GHz and 2 x Cortex A-76 cores clocked at 1.92 GHz. The other 4 cores are Cortex-A55 clocked at 1.8 GHz.

The higher-clocked Cortex-A76 (2.6 GHz) cores here will be used to handle heavy applications or the startup process of the phone. The lower-clocked (1.92 GHz) Cortex-A76 cores will handle minor tasks with the help of Cortex-A55 cores.

World’s First

The Kirin 980 SoC comes with a lot of world’s first technologies. For example, this is the world’s first SoC to be manufactured through the 7NM process. It also has the world’s first MALI-G76 GPU. It has got the world’s first CAT.21 MODEM up to 1.4 GBPS download speed. This SoC has the world’s first smartphone WiFi up to 1.7 GBPS. World’s first Dual-NPU, Cortex-A76 based, supporting LPDDR4X up to 2133 MHz and Dual ISP 46% performance.

Huawei has further mentioned that using all the eight cores at the same time is a very rare case because it increases the power consumption and heat dissipation through the phone. The Cortex-A76 cores are quite big and that’s why they’ve been split into two different clusters. Huawei did not mention the operating frequencies of the CPU clusters.

The Kirin 980 SoC is all set to make its way onto the Huawei Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro. Huawei will pull the curtains off from the Mate 20 phones at an exclusive event that will take place in London on 16th of October 2018.

Let us know what do you think about the new Huawei 980. Do you see it performing better than the Kirin 970 SoC? Stay in touch with us to know more about the new CPU and upcoming Huawei handsets.