Technology & IT | Tuesday 16 October, 2018 12:45 am |

The days of having a PC in your pocket are upon us. Mobile phones today deliver emails, phone calls, videos, documents and even conference calls into the palm of your hand. The brain that powers all these functions (and more) in a mobile phone is its chipset. The more powerful the chipset, the better the performance of the phone. All that mobile phone manufacturers need today is the right chipset to deliver their next flagship that is bigger and better than the last – and the competition’s. 

 

Thus the battle moves behind the scenes, to the chipsets that are powering mobile phones. While many companies working in chipset design, usurper Huawei has taken to designing its own chipsets to ensure that it can bring its groundbreaking technology to life in its phones. Its Kirin line of chipsets changed the game by being the first to launch on-device AI and a neural processing unit (NPU) that allows on-device and cloud-based AI to run side by side. 

 

While the competition quickly followed suit, Huawei still had a first-mover advantage and is now in its second generation of NPUs and on-device AI with the launch of its Kirin 980 that is set to power the company’s next mate 20 series to be launched globally in London tomorrow. Huawei has always nurtured a culture of innovation and is now leading the way in the field of mobile intelligence.

 

Huawei’s latest chipset, the Kirin 980, introduced the world to the first-ever 7 nanometer processor that packs 1.6x times the transistors than the previous generation 10 nanometer technology that is used by other smart phone processors. This is a good 6.9 billion transistors all packed into a 1 cm2 sized chip, translating into more efficiency and processing power. Some companies took a similar step later when they launched a chip on some new phones after  Huawei's launch of the chip "Kirin 980

 

Set to power Huawei’s upcoming flagship Mate 20 Series tomorrow, the Kirin 980 will enable 37 percent better performance and 32 percent more power efficiency, compared to other processor, making the upcoming Mate 20 Series the most powerful Android phone. In addition, on the gaming scene, the Kirin 980 performs 22 percent better but consumes 32 percent less power, providing a better and longer gaming experience. 

 

Focusing on accelerated AI-based processing, Kirin 980 includes a Dual NPU that performs AI-assisted image recognition tasks at a rate of 4,500 images per minute – double the speed of the other chipset companies – resulting in much quicker scene recognition while taking photos or recording videos.  

 

Another first in the Kirin 980 is the ARM Cortex A76 cores that are touted to produce ‘laptop-class performance’, as well as the Mail G76 GPU. While the Kirin 980 features four Cortex A76 cores and four A55 cores, Huawei puts these to most efficient use by splitting the four Cortex A76 cores into two cores running at 2.6GHz and the other two at 1.92GHz. Each of these sets has its own voltage plane which means that power will not be wasted when the CPU is at high utilization – for example when playing a resource intensive game. The result? The Kirin 980 consumes 32% less power than other processor in games, which translates to a much better battery life than is allowed by the other processor. It also means a 22% faster gaming performance compared to the other processor. 

 

The Kirin 980 processor also has an unmatched WiFi speed at 1732Mbps peak throughout - more than double the speed of the other processor WiFi. Think super-fast downloading of games and uninterrupted streaming movies. Besides fast WiFi, the Kirin 980 allows 1.4Gbps download speeds using LTE on the world’ first Cat.21 modem. The Kirin 980 has optimized the outdoor gaming experience by reducing interruption while on the metro and high-speed railways. With the Kirin 980, users will experience only one tenth the interruption compared to the other processor.

 

The Kirin 980 processor is expected to power upcoming Huawei flagship Mate 20 series that will be launched globally on 16thOctober in London and regionally in MEA on 24th October in Dubai; and based on the above information, its performance and efficiency will be hard to match even by the ‘me-too’ 7 nanometer chipsets in the market.