Huawei is gradually stepping up in chip fabrication and already produced several SoCs from mid to high range, those are being used on its own devices. Recently, we had reported about Company’s forthcoming flagship grade chipset – the Kirin 970; that will be utilized in most of the Huawei’s high-end smartphones. Rumors suggest that Huawei Mate 10 would be the first smartphone to have it.
Surprisingly, The company has showcased the Kirin 970 at IFA 2017. The new chipset makes several improvements over last year’s Kirin 960. It employs TSMC’s 10nm process whereas, 960 was using the 16nm process. So, we can expect great power efficiency in a smaller package. However, this is not a new thing in the smartphones industry, though, the first time you will see in Huawei smartphones. The integrated CPU is octa core, where 4 x A73 cores are clocked @ 2.3GHz while another 4 x A53 cores are clocked @ 1.8Ghz with given GPU of Mali-G72 MP12.
The rest of the features are dual ISP for motion detection and low light enhancement, support for HDR10 with 4K60 decoding, 4K30 encoding, and an LTE Category 18 modem, which is capable of going up 1.2Gbps for download speed. Besides, the chipset comes along with a dedicated Neural processing unit (
| SoC | Kirin 970 | Kirin 960 | Kirin 950 |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | 4x Cortex-A73 @ 2.4GHz 4x Cortex A53 @ 1.8GHz |
4x Cortex-A73 @ 2.4GHz 4x Cortex A53 @ 1.8GHz |
4x Cortex-A72 @ 2.3GHZ 4x Cortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz |
| GPU | Mali-G72 MP12 | Mali-G71 MP8 @900MHz | Mali-T880 MP4 @900MHz |
| Neural Processing Unit (NPU) | Yes | No | No |
| Media processing | 2160p60 HEVC & H.264 Decode 2160p30 Encode HDR10 |
2160p30 HEVC & H.264 Decode & Encode 2160p60 HEVC Decode |
1080p H.264 Decode & Encode 2160p30 HEVC Decode |
| RAM | 4x LPDDR4 | 2x LPDDR4 | 2x LPDDR4 |
| LTE modem | LTE Cat 18 | LTE Cat 12 | LTE Cat 6 |
| Flash interface | UFS 2.1 | UFS 2.1 | eMMC 5.1 |
| Process | TSMC 10nm | 16nm FinFET | 16nm FinFET |
