Huawei Kirin 980 to Outcome Apple A12 Bionic

Recently, Apple held a new product launch conference and apart from the new products, it also announced the Apple A12 B12 Bionic chip. As the Cupertino-based company claims, it’s the world’s first 7nm chip. The latter consists of a six-core CPU (two ‘performance’ cores and four ‘efficiency’ cores), a quad-core GPU (50% faster than the A11), and an updated variant of the neural engine, a special component of the chip used to process AI tasks.

But the Apple A12 Bionic won’t be the only 7nm SoC. Soon, on October 16, Huawei will launch its own chip with such characteristics, namely the Kirin 980. The latter will also be the world’s first processor to support 2133MHz LPDDR4X memory. It has a Cortex-A76 architecture CPU and a Mali-G76 GPU (the world’s first commercial use). They will bring significant performance and energy efficiency improvements to the processor, with a CPU core performance up to 75% and an energy efficiency up 58%, while the GPU performance will be improved up to 46% and the energy efficiency up 178% compared to the previous generation.

Seems the Kirin 980 has all chances to successfully compete with the Apple A12 Bionic chip. Moreover, Huawei seems to be very confident about this. According to Techradar, in a keynote speech held in Dubai recently, an official from Huawei said that Huawei is confident that Kirin 980 will outperform Apple’s A12 Bionic chip.

In the speech, Huawei also said that the Kirin 980 has 6.9 billion transistors, which is exactly the same amount that Apple has done on the A12 Bionic. At the same time, the official confirmed the improvements we talked about above. These advances should make Kirin 980 faster and more efficient. In addition, Huawei is smarter through real-time video processing and the ability to recognize 4,500 images per minute. The AI load prediction will also make the processor smarter, ensuring when performance is available and when performance is reduced to save power.

Finally, Huawei said that in terms of connectivity, the Kirin 980 will be the world’s first processor to support LTE Cat.21 with a peak download speed of 1.4Gbps.