The Snapdragon 845 is one constant among all flagship Android smartphones this year not made by Huawei. You can find it in devices like the Galaxy Note 9. Huawei is one of the very few manufacturers that develops its own processors and the company has unveiled the much awaited Kirin 980 chip at IFA 2018 in Berlin.
Huawei says that the Kirin 980 is the world’s first mobile processor built on the 7nm process technology and the first based on ARM’s Cortex-A76 CPU and Mali-G76 GPU. The firsts don’t end here according to the company. It’s also said to be the first with an LTE CAT 21 modem with support for download speeds of up to 1.4 Gbps and the first chip to have support for 2133MHz LPDDR4X RAM.
So what does the Kirin 980 vs Snapdragon 845 contest looks like? The company says that its chip has 20 percent better bandwidth which will lead to faster app launches. The Kirin 980 is also claimed to produce 22 percent higher frame rates in games than the Snapdragon 845 with power consumption being 32 percent less when gaming.
A new dual image signal processor is onboard as well which makes the chip 46 percent faster at camera processing than Huawei’s previous flagship chip. The dual neural processing unit improves artificial intelligence capabilities as well. It can perform AI-assisted image recognition tasks at 4,500 images per minute while the Snapdragon 845 reaches 2,371.
The true extent of its performance gains will only be visible once devices powered by this chip hit the market. Huawei has confirmed that the upcoming Mate 20 will be the first device with this chip. Honor, Huawei’s sub-brand, is also working on a device that will launch with the Kirin 980.