Huawei officially released the Kirin 980 with world’s first six technologies

On August 31 at IFA 2018, Huawei officially unveiled the Next generation mobile SoC processor “Kirin 980” at IFA 2018 in Germany, claimed to be dazzlingly powerful.

Yu Chengdong, Senior Vice President, Huawei Technologies, announced Kirin 980 which is created ‘the first’ in many aspects, such as the first 7nm process SoC, ARM A76 architecture CPU, dual NPU, Mali-G76 GPU, first to feature 1.4Gbps Cat.21 baseband and first to support LPDDR4X-2133 memory.

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 processor.



According to TSMC’s data, 7nm can achieve 20% performance improvement compared to 10nm, 40% energy efficiency improvement, 60% transistor density increase, and applied to Kirin 980, integrating up to 6.9 billion transistors.

Kirin 970 (10nm 5.5 billion) increased by 25%, while transistor density increased by 55 %, and the chip area is only equivalent to the size of the fingernail.

The new SoC first adopts the ARM Cortex-A76 architecture, which is 75% better than the previous generation Kirin 970 A73, and the energy efficiency is increased by 58%. Compared to the Snapdragon 845, the Kirin 980 claims a 37% higher performance and a 32% higher energy efficiency.



Yu Chengdong said that Kirin 980 has invested in more than 1,000 senior semiconductor process experts after 36 months of research and development.

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 also 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.