Huawei has unveiled the HiSilicon Kirin 990 and HiSilicon Kirin 990 5G chipsets, as expected, at IFA 2019 in Berlin. Among the two, the Kirin 990 5G as Huawei claims is the world’s first flagship 5G SoC where the 5G modem is integrated right into the platform. The Kirin 990 and Kirin 990 5G will debut for the first time inside Huawei’s upcoming Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro which is touted to launch on September 19 in Munich.
The new HiSilicon Kirin 990 and Kirin 990 5G are made using TSMC’s 7nm and 7nm plus extreme ultraviolet lithography processes respectively and thus comes in a smaller form factor than that of the Snapdragon 855 from Qualcomm. The Kirin 990 is the world’s first SoC with over 10.3 billion transistors built-in.
The standard Kirin 990 comprises of two ARM Cortex A76 cores clocked at 2.86GHz, two Cortex A76 cores clocked at 2.09 GHz and four Cortex A55 cores clocked at 1.86GHz. The Kirin 990 5G features two ARM Cortex A76 cores clocked at 2.86GHz, two Cortex A76 cores clocked at 2.36 GHz and four Cortex A55 cores at 1.95GHz.
Both SoCs are coupled with an ARM Mali-G76MP16 16-core GPU clocked at 700MHz and offer support for LPDDR4X RAM and UFS 3.0 or UFS 2.1 storage. Huawei says the latest flagship chipsets will be able to offer a 10 percent improvement in power consumption and 36 percent reduction in board size. The Kirin 990 also offers 12 percent, 35 percent and 15 percent improvements in Big-Core, middle-core and little-core efficiency.
As for AI, Huawei has added a new quad-core Neural processing unit which is based on a new Da Vinci Architecture for more performance and better efficiency. The NPU will be able to render real-time videos. Interestingly, the regular Kirin 990 offers a single Big Core + Tiny Core NPU setup while the 5G-enabled model offers a dual Big Core + Tiny Core configuration.
For imaging, the Kirin 990 duo will support the fifth-generation Dual ISP with DSLR-like noise reduction, 3D filters and block matching. Huawei will also enable the Dual-domain noise reduction when recording videos and for AI colour adjustment. The Chipset will support 4K at 60fps decoding and decoding at 30fps as well as HDR 10 support.
Huawei is also offering a new Face AR which offers real-time tracking of faces, expressions and face re-modelling along with heart rate, respiration rate and health analysis.
Huawei has also unveiled the Kirin A1 wearables Processor that will power the Huawei FreeBuds 3 true wireless earbuds. The chipset supports Bluetooth 5.1, Bluetooth LE 5.1 and features an isochronous dual channel Bluetooth technology developed by Huawei.
The Kirin 990 and Kirin 990 5G will debut inside the Huawei Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro on September 19.