IFA has been a mixed bag over the last couple of years, with most major smartphone announcements happening elsewhere. That said, IFA is where we see tablets, accessories (smartwatches, especially) and more technology-focused announcements, and it is in this vein that we have news from Huawei.
That Huawei is presenting at IFA is of little surprise, but it is widely anticipated that Huawei will announce its new processor – the Kirin 980 – this year at the event.
What do we know about the upcoming chip from Huawei? In short, not too much. It has been reported that the Kirin 980 will feature 7nm process technology, with four A77 big cores and four A55 small cores (a fairly standard ARM processor arrangement). This will allow the Kirin 980 to reach 2.8 GHz.
The inclusion of a Neural Processing Unit isn’t new, either – on-board AI is a big thing these days. Kirin 980 will reportedly include a 1M Cabricon chip, developed earlier this year. Designed especially for visual, speech and natural language processing, these chips can – at the top end – perform something in the order of 8 Trillion operations per watt of energy, and that’s a hell of a lot.
We’re likely to see the Kirin 980 in the Mate 20, which will probably show up later this year. If early results are anything to go by – and they sometimes are – the Mate 20 visited AnTuTu with a score of 350,000 or so … which puts its GPU performance quite a bit higher than the Mate 10 (and literally just about everything else on the market, too).
