In this edition of IFA, Huawei chose not to present any smartphone, opposed to what it did last year when it launched the Nova range. As the Chinese smartphone manufacturer decided to launch its Kirin 970 chipset. Hence, Huawei introduced its Kirin 970 SoC with On-Device AI capabilities.
Huawei Launches Kirin 970 Chipset With On-Device AI Capabilities
In this edition of IFA, Huawei chose not to present any smartphone, contrary to what it did last year when it launched the Nova range.
Although there is no new smartphone, Huawei introduced its new processor, the Kirin 970, which promises to bring a lot of news.
IFA 2017 is, by excellence, a place where several brands choose to present their new technologies. After knowing the news of Sony, LG and many other brands now comes the time to know what Huawei has to present.
After last year it has introduced a new model in its smartphone portfolio, Huawei Nova, this year the Chinese brand had already announced that it would not introduce any new model. Instead, it has made official its new processor, the Kirin 970, which should raise the smartphones of Huawei and Honor to another level.
The new Kirin 970 was developed in the 10nm process, has 5.5 billion transistors in an area of 1 square centimeter and has eight cores, four ARM Cortex A73 clocked at 2.4 GHz and four ARM Cortex A53 clocked at 1.8 GHz. Not only that, as it is the first SoC to incorporate the 12-core Mali-G72 GPU that promises improved efficiency and performance.
Artificial Intelligence as a Focus
In addition to the traditional evolution of cores, clocks, and GPU, Huawei has introduced a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) in Kirin 970, which will introduce some new artificial intelligence innovations already announced by the brand. Compared to a Quadcore Cortex-A73 CPU, this new architecture offers 25% more performance with 50% more efficiency.
In practical terms, the Kirin 970 with its CPU + GPU + NPU set can process about 2005 images per minute, and is faster than the competition, with the iPhone 7 Plus (CPU + GPU) to be achieved the 487 and the Samsung S8 as 95 (CPU only).
With this NPU, Huawei wants to take the next step in artificial intelligence, moving from an AI strictly in the Cloud to a mixed AI in the Cloud and device, giving the user better performance, more customization and greater utility.
To take advantage of the latest in artificial intelligence, Huawei is positioning Kirin 970 as an open platform for mobile AI, allowing partners and programmers to take advantage of these new features in their applications and devices by launching a website for the purpose and a development kit for Kirin AI.
In addition to the novelties in artificial intelligence, the Kirin 970 also features improved image signal processing, with a new dual ISP with noise reduction in the image, improved hybrid autofocus and improved pickup of moving elements, reducing blur from displacement.
A new 4.5G modem has also been introduced that allows an improvement in the recognition of 4G networks and speeds up to 1.2 Gbps with CAT18. The first smartphone to be released with this processor will be the Huawei Mate 10, which already has a submission date scheduled for October 16.
So, what do you think about this new SoC? Simply share your views and thoughts in the comment section below.