Huawei’s HiSilicon to launch Kirin 710 to take on Snapdragon 710

HiSilicon Technologies, a Huawei smartphone solution subsidiary, is reportedly to launch its new mid-tier solution, the Kirin 710, in July and, as suggested by its product name, is to take directly on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 710, according to industry sources.

The Kirin 710, an upgrade of its predecessor Kirin 659 CPU, comes with Huawei’s own chipset architecture based on the Cortex A73 CPUs and is being built using a 12nm process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).

As with HiSilicon’s high-end solution Kirin 970, the Kirin 710 also comes with a built-in discrete NPU (neural processing unit) to perform AI functionalities.

In comparison, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 will be built using a 10nm node at Samsung Electronics and feature a multi-core AI engine and neural network processing capabilities.

The Snapdragon 710 comes with new architecture which has been engineered to result in substantial performance improvements without sacrificing battery life, using cores based on the Cortex A75 and A55.

The first phone to be announced with the Snapdragon 710 is likely to be Xiaomi Technology’s Mi 8 SE and then followed by a model from Oppo, the sources

Meanwhile, Huawei is expected to launch a series of Kirin 710-based smartphones to counter rival models based on the Snapdragon 710, said the sources.

The first Kirin 710-powered model is likely to be Huawei’s nova 3 (codenamed Paris), which is expected to be launched in July, featuring 19.5:9 all-screen display and supporting dual-lens camera.

Huawei also has two models of its smartphones (series numbers PRA-AL00 and PRA-TL00) been verified for meeting 3C (China Compulsory Certification) standards, the sources revealed.

Huawei is expected to ship over 140 million smartphones in 2018, with mid-tier models accounting for at least 50% of total shipments, the sources estimated.

//Digitimes