Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being used as a marketing tag for most phones these days, seldom companies manage to get the true sense of it. Huawei is one of the few brands that has utilised AI in its true sense in the latest flagship Kirin 980 chipset, which will debut in the upcoming Mate 20 smartphone on October 16.
From Apple's A-series chipsets to Qualcomm's incredibly popular Snapdragon-series, chipsets have gotten far more advanced to truly unlock the capabilities of a flagship smartphone. With the right hardware, smartphones today have shattered the conventional imagination of what's possible on a mobile device. Huawei, with its all-new Kirin 980 SoC, seems to be leading the charge with its innovative, cutting-edge technologies ready to be deployed in the next commercial flagship next month.
We had the chance to sit down with the Huawei team at a media briefing session about Kirin 980 on Friday, where we discussed the core features of the new chipset and what makes it the best – at least for now. From what we gathered at our discussion with the Huawei team, it is clear that the Kirin 980 is no-compromise chipset for power users.
Huawei's Kirin 980 marks several industry-first innovations. Take a look –
- World's first 7nm chipset
- World's first Cortex A76 based CPU
- World's first Mali-G76 GPU
- World's first Dual-NPU
- World's first Cat. 21 modem
- World's fastest smartphone Wi-Fi
- World's first chipset with LPDDR 4X support up to 2133MHz
- Finally, Dual ISP to deliver 46 percent better performance
How does it matter to end consumers?
There are so many features a smartphone offers and we use on a regular basis that we fail to understand its worth. Let's take Wi-Fi for instance. We have our saved networks and use them for high-speed browsing. But your smartphone doesn't truly leverage your Wi-Fi broadband bandwidth at its best speeds. Huawei has fixed that for you.
Kirin 980 chipset comes with the fastest Hi1103 Wi-Fi module supporting up to 1.7Gbps. Even if you're on your mobile network, the Kirin 980's Cat. 21 modem pushes download speeds up to 1.4Gbps. The attention to detail in the Huawei chipset directly translates to a better user experience, even when users don't realise it.
Another great use-case scenario with the latest chipset is its improved GPS. Kirin 980 comes with dual frequency (L1 and L5) GPS for precise positioning with 10 times greater accuracy.
Kirin 980 chipset is also based on 7nm architecture – world's first to do that so far - enabling better performance with more power efficiency. According to the company, Kirin 980 delivers 20 percent improved performance and 40 percent more efficiency compared to Kirin 970.
Another noteworthy addition is the Dual NPU AI processing, which is done on-device. With this, actions like facial recognition, object recognition and detection, AI translations, multi-person motion prediction at 30fps, and more is done seamlessly. The chipset also has two dedicated turbo cores, which kick in only when there's a requirement for it in cases such as high-graphics gaming and surprisingly while using Gallery.
You are right to wonder why the Gallery app would awaken turbo cores in the chipset. But to answer that, Huawei said the Kirin 980 recognises up to 4,500 images per minute.
It is worth mentioning that Kirin 980 is the 5G-ready chipset, but the company says it is currently enabled with 4.5G, which means if Reliance Jio or Airtel has plans to roll out the upgraded network in India anytime soon then Huawei Mate 20 will be ready to handle it.
Just when you thought a flagship smartphone can only improve cameras, design, display, battery and things alike, Huawei surprises you with Kirin 980. We cannot wait to try out the Mate 20 at its upcoming launch and share our review with you guys. Stay tuned for more.
