IFA 2018 | Huawei finally officially releases Kirin 980 processors

Huawei's new Kirin 980 processor has been rumored to be the chipset of choice for upcoming flagships such as the Mate 20. More importantly, however, it had the potential to be the world's first 7nm mobile processor, depending on when it would be released. Huawei has taken its showcase at this year's IFA event to make sure the Kirin 980 lived up to this reputation.

Not only was the Kirin 980 made using TMSC's N7 node, it is also the first to feature the new Cortex A76s as 4 of its 8 cores. This new ARM core can run at up to 3.3GHz. However, Huawei have clocked two at 2.6GHz and another two at 1.92GHz to make up these Kirin 980 clusters. This has reportedly been done to keep the A76's power consumption under control. It will be interesting to see how they compete with Samsung's corresponding Mongoose technology.

The Kirin 980 has a third cluster, made up of four Cortex A55 cores clocked at 1.8GHz each. ARM's DynamIQ Shared Unit (DSU) will ensure that tasks associated with the power brackets of each cluster will be distributed accordingly. Huawei already claims that the Kirin 980 is superior to the Snapdragon 845 in Geekbench testing, and outperforms the Kirin 970 by 75%.

The Kirin 980 also features the new Mali G76MP10 GPU, which, as Huawei claims, beats the preceding Mali G72 chip by 46% in terms of performance and 176% in terms of power efficiency. The 980 also has a new, larger NPU. Huawei projects that it will improve on that of the Kirin 970 by up to 134%. while using 88% less power.

These are all very interesting specs and figures. However, the Kirin 980's actual worth may be defined when it comes up against a Snapdragon counterpart in real-world tests. Stay tuned to notebookcheck.net for more on the Kirin 980 in the near future.

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