Huawei shows off 7nm Kirin 980 SoC
 

Octa-core SoC with dual NPUs

Huawei is obviously going after its competition with its latest Kirin 980 SoC, which is all about being the world's first SoC in many categories, including the first made on TSMC's 7nm, the first with Cortex-A76 cores, dual NPUs, and plenty of other things too.

Huawei has attracted a lot of attention with its Kirin SoCs, and while it always lagged behind the competition, it appears that the game will soon change with the flagship Kirin 980 SoC, which is the world's first SoC made on TSMC's 7nm manufacturing process. In addition to being the first 7nm SoC, Huawei said it ticks a couple of other boxes, including the first to use Cortex-A76 cores, the first with Mali G76 GPU, the first with dual NPUs, the first with Cat.21 LTE modem, the first supporting LPDDR4X-2133, the first with up to 1.7Mbps WiFi, and the first with dual ISP. That's a lot of firsts.
Interesting octa-core design

The Huawei Kirin 980 SoC packs 6.9 billion transistors, a 6.8x increment in transistor density starting with the 28nm Kirin 920. The Kirin 980 SoC has an interesting octa-core design, featuring two high-performance Cortex-A76 cores clocked at up to 2.76GHz, two mid-performance Cortex-A76 cores at up to 1.92GHz and four low-power Cortex-A55 CPU cores at up to 1.8GHz. It is also the first one to include the Mali-G76 MP10 GPU.

Such design, as well as the fact that it is made on TSMC's 7nm manufacturing process, let Huawei make some bold claims, suggesting it could bring up to a 20 percent performance boost and up to a 40 percent performance improvement when it comes to power efficiency,l compared to the Kirin 970, which was not half bad either.

On the CPU front, the Cortex-A76 cores are likely to deliver up toa 75 percent performance boost and up to a 58 percent better power efficiency, while the GPU performance is up by 46 percent with up to 176 percent higher power efficiency. The GPU will also use Huawei's GPU Turbo technology which can boost the GPU clock under heavy load, providing better gaming performance, Huawei claimed.

In addition to improvements on the CPU and the GPU side, the Kirin 980 will also support LPDDR4X 2133MHz memory, which are likely to further boost performance.

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