Huawei announced the world’s first 7nm chipset, the Kirin 980 at IFA last week and based on the information Huawei has revealed, it’s positioned to be the leading chipset on the Android platform- easily surpassing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 in terms of performance and power efficiency. The 7nm process allows Huawei to pack 1.6x times the transistors than the previous generation 10nm technology that is used by Snapdragon 845. 

There are quite a few innovations that Huawei is bringing with the Kirin 980. Starting off, it’s the first processor equipped by the new ARM Cortex A76 cores as well as the Mail G76 GPU. The Kirin 980 features four Cortex A76 cores and four A55 cores. 

ARM, the company that’s designed these cores is positioning at Cortex A76 at “Laptop-class performance” and according to Huawei, the Kirin 980 will have 75% higher CPU performance than the Kirin 970 while the Mali-G76 is said to offer 46% greater graphics processing power. 

To help get the most out of these fast cores, the Kirin 980 also supports the latest low power DDR4X memory at 2133MHz speed. This means that your apps will launch much faster and your games will play more smoother with higher frame rates. You can realistically expect over 20% faster gaming performance on the Kirin 980 compared to the Snapdragon 845. 

Another area where the Kirin 980 is expected to smoke the competition is AI based processing. Being a pioneer in AI with last year’s NPU that was faster than any other commercially available mobile SoC, this year’s Kirin 980 will be equipped with a dual NPU that can recognize up to 4,500 images per minute, or twice as fast as the Snapdragon 845.

Besides being fast, the Kirin 980 is also much more power efficient with Huawei claiming 58% higher power efficiency compared to its last generation processor. What’s especially interesting is that Huawei has split 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 you won’t be wasting a lot of power when the CPU is at high, such as, when you’re playing a resource intensive game.

Huawei claims that the Kirin 980 can consume over 30% less power than Snapdragon 845 in games which means that battery life will be much better than phones equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor.

Huawei has also improved WiFi speed on the Kirin 980 processor that is capable of a peak throughput of 1732Mbps which is more than twice as fast as Qualcomm’s WiFi module on the Snapdragon 845. You’ll be able to download games and movies faster and enjoy uninterrupted streaming from the likes of Netflix. Besides fast WiFi, the Kirin 980 will also feature world’ first Cat.21 modem allowing 1.4Gbps download speeds using LTE. 

The Kirin 980 processor is expected to power upcoming HUAWEI Mate 20 flagship phones and we can’t wait to try it out. Based on the above info, we are expecting it to the fastest Android chipset this year, which is announced on October 16th in London.