Huawei's next-gen flagship SoC, the Kirin 990, is already in development

Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin chipsets may be exclusive to the company’s devices but they, for the most part, are already on par with offerings from Qualcomm and Samsung. According to the LinkedIn profile of what appears to be a Huawei engineer, the company is already working on its next premium SoC, the Kirin 990.

The company released its new Kirin 980 flagship SoC at IFA a few months ago, and the chipset managed to outdo the Snapdragon 845 in almost every department. Of course, the Snapdragon 855 was launched earlier this month, and parity has been restored. Huawei could be looking to flip the tables once again, though, especially as there have been reports that the Kirin 990 could be launched in Q1 2019. 

Huawei generally releases its new flagship SoCs towards the end of the year, in time for the Mate phones. Launching a mid-cycle chipset would be out of the norm, although it wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened, as something similar occured with the Kirin 955 back in 2016.

The Kirin 990 will be based on TSMC’s 7nm manufacturing node, just like the Kirin 980. It’ll likely feature higher clocked cores and a more powerful GPU, though.