Huawei has announced at IFA 2019 its new flagship chipset series, consisting of the Kirin 990 4G and the Kirin 990 5G.
The two chipsets are almost identical except for a few factors – one has support for 5G connectivity, while the other does not. Huawei is calling the Kirin 990 5G as the “industry’s first 5G SoC” as previous chipsets needed separate modems for 5G connectivity.
The Kirin 990 5G was also built using TSMC’s 7nm+ EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography, allowing them to fit 10.3 billion transistors in a 100mm2 die size. The Kirin 990 4G, which is built using the Kirin 980’s 7nm process, has 8 billion transistors.
Also, the Kirin 990 5G’s medium frequency Cortex-A76 cores and four efficient Cortex-A55 cores have a higher clock speed than the Kirin 990 4G. There’s also a difference in NPU as the Kirin 990 5G has a 2 Big-Core + 1 Tiny-Core design compared to the 1 Big-Core + 1 Tiny-Core on the Kirin 990 4G. The rest are similar, both have 16-core Mali-G76 GPUs, and support for UFS 3.0 and 2.1.
As for performance, Huawei said that the Kirin 990 5G has a 9% increase in single-thread performance and a 10% increase in multi-thread performance compared to the Kirin 980. It also boasts 5G connectivity speeds of up to 2.3Gbps downlink and up to 1.25Gbps uplink. It also packs a 5th-gen signal processor for “DSLR-level” noise reduction. We can also expect improvements in GPU performance and power efficiency.
Huawei is yet to announce which devices will sport the new chipsets, but we might see them in the Mate 30 series when they launch later this month.
