Huawei says its new smartphone chip is faster than Snapdragon in almost every way

Over the years, we’ve gotten used to two smartphone SoCs (system-on-a-chip) battling for dominance: Apple’s A series of chips and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8xx series. 

But Huawei’s new smartphone chip, the Kirin 980, is poised to usurp that duopoly. 

At its press conference ahead of the IFA trade show in Berlin, Huawei unveiled all the details of the new chip that will power its next flagship smartphones (the first in line will be the Huawei Mate 20, which is likely to launch in October). 

The presentation started with a list of world firsts for the Kirin 980, and it was a pretty long list. It’s the first smartphone chip built with a 7-nanometer process and the first to feature ARM’s Cortex-A76 CPU as well as its new Mali-G76 GPU. It’s the first SoC to support the ultra-fast 2,133Mhz LPDDR4X memory, and the first with an integrated 1.4Gbps Cat.21 modem, too. 

All of that doesn’t really matter much to the average consumer; what matters is performance. According to Huawei, the new chip offers a 75 percent performance improvement over the last generation, with a 58 percent improvement in power efficiency. The company showed us a lot (and I really mean a lot) of charts (that we weren’t allowed to share) which show the Kirin 980 to be significantly faster than Snapdragon’s 845 chip. 

Some of Kirin 980’s strengths include AI-based prediction of CPU loading, meaning the smartphone should activate its resources when you really need them and save energy when you’re doing something less computationally intensive. App launch times should be faster than on Snapdragon 845. Image recognition will be significantly faster, allowing the system to recognize 4,500 images per minute, which should result in better object recognition and real-time processing for video (as opposed to photos only). 

The chip’s modem should perform better in tough scenarios such as in a metro or a high-speed rail, and Wi-Fi should be the “world’s fastest” thanks to Huawei’s in-house Wi-Fi chipset. Even the GPS will be more precise; Huawei uses dual-frequency GPS positioning, which should result in a tenfold increase in accuracy. 

We won’t know for sure whether any of this is true until the Kirin 980 is out there and tested independently, but Huawei’s Kirin processors have been strong contenders for a while, making Huawei’s top phones roughly as fast as Apple and Samsung flagships. If the Kirin 980 lives up to these promises, the Mate 20 will be one fast phone.