Huawei's Kirin 820 mid-range 5G SoC gets leaked specs

Besides the high-end Kirin 1020 SoC planned for Q3 2020, Huawei also intends to update the mid-range models with the Kirin 820, which has already been confirmed to be powering the upcoming Honor 30S in a leaked ad. Thanks to Weibo user Digital Chat Station we now have some unofficial specs, as well.

The upcoming mid-range SoC will still be manufactured on the 7 nm node, unlike the Kirin 1020 that should use TSMC’s latest 5 nm EUV tech. Compared to the current Kirin 810 SOC, the most important upgrades for the 820 model include an integrated 5G modem, improved ISP and NPU units, plus a more powerful Mali-G77 GPU, which is considerably faster than the G66 on the Kirin 990 and almost twice as fast as the G52 on the Kirin 810. Huawei decided not to upgrade the ARM Cortex-A76 performance cores, however.

If Huawei launches the Kirin 820 this April, it will be the fastest mid-range SoC on the market, going head to head with Mediatek’s Dimensity 1000L and most likely beating the Exynos 980 from Samsung or the Snapdragon 765G from Qualcomm. By the looks of it, Huawei may conserve its leading position for another year, and this is quite an impressive feat considering that the Chinese company is facing new ban threats around the globe, not to mention COVID-19 setbacks.