Huawei officially launches Kirin 990 Series including 5G-integrated mobile processor

On September 6 at IFA 2019, Huawei Consumer Business Group CEO Mr. Richard Yu revealed the mystery behind “Rethink Evolution” as Kirin 990 series, manufactured with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturer Company’s (TSMC) 7nm FinFET Plus EUV technology combined with new and powerful Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for the next level of Artificial Intelligence performance.

“Kirin 990 (5G) is the world’s first 5G SoC, and it will enable end-users to access superb 5G connectivity experience one step ahead in the first year of 5G commercialization,” said Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group.

“To meet users’ requirements for enhanced 5G experiences in the 5G era, Kirin 990 (5G) has been fully upgraded in terms of performance and power efficiency, AI computing, and ISP, extending mobile phone experiences to a new level,” he added.

According to Huawei, the Kirin 990 integrates 10.3 billion transistors compared to Kirin 980 with 6.9 billion transistors.

The Kirin 990 embed two big Cortex-A76 based cores at 2.86Ghz + two middle Cortex-A76 cores at 2.36Ghz + four small A55 cores at 1.95Ghz. The overall processing performance of the Kirin 990 series increased over 20% and energy efficiency increased by 30%.

To deliver the next-gen gaming performance, the Kirin 990 has Mali-G76 MC16 architecture elevates the performance by 30% while optimizing energy efficiency by 46%.

Huawei last year introduced its Dual NPU structure, to harness new AI capabilities. To push the AI performance even further, the Kirin 990 adopts DaVinci NPU architecture including 2 Big-Core + 1 Tiny-Core.

The new mobile processor comes with Balong 5G modem embedded directly on the SoC, supporting 5G/4G/3G/2G networks and providing fastest downlink at 2.3-gigabits per seconds (Gbps) and 1.25Gbps upload.

The latest ISP is enhanced by 15%. Coupled with BM3D11 hardware-level noise reduction, it is capable of producing vivid photos of natural views, city architectures and stunning night shots. Real-time video segmenting and rendering requires a powerful and stable video processing capability.

Huawei has announced that Kirin 990 also has a 4G version that’s not processed with EUV process. Compared to its 5G version, 4G Kirin 990 only has 1 big + 1 Tiny NPU Core. The CPU remains the same but with less power compared to the 5G version.