Huawei’s new P20 Plus smartphone with a triple camera system is a pretty impressive looking device, but it packs the same Kirin 970 processor as last year’s Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro smartphones.
So what’s next for Huawei? Apparently a Mate 20 smartphone with a next-gen Kirin 980 processor.
As the folks at Chinese website cnmo noticed, results for an unannounced Mate 20 showed up recently in the Antutu benchmark database.
If you’re curious, the phone scored nearly 357,000 points in the benchmark, blowing away the next-closest Android phones (which happen to be the Mate 10 and Mate 20). But it’s probably best to take these sorts of benchmarks with a grain of salt, since they’re not always indicative of real-world performance.
That said, last year’s Kirin 970 processor was already pretty zippy, offering competitive performance with the market-leading Qualcomm Snapdragon 835. The updated Kirin 980 will likely compete with the newer Snapdragon 845 chip which powers phones like the new Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+.
Huawei develops the Kirin line of processors in-house, and rumor has it that the new Kirin 980 chip will be manufactured using TSMC’s 7nm technology and feature ARM Cortex-A75 CPU cores, Bluetooth 5.0, and an updated version of Huawei’s NPU, or neural processing unit (for artificial intelligence tasks such as auto-scene recognition in the camera app).
via PlayfulDroid
Say what you will about them but a least for the USA& Canada they are the only ones saving us from The Samsung and by default Qualcomm & Apple monopoly in the phone market. All the other brands seem to be going nowhere fast and we are left with a choice of two. The Kirin 950 was a breakthrough processor showing the then current Snapdragon 820\821 a clean pair of heels. All the other that have followed in that series have been pretty good…having said that we are long overdue for The Arm A-75 & A-55 to show up but I doubt we will see 7nm processors in a product you can buy in 2018.
Even China sites note first that this might be a fake.
This is a screenshot not a result in a database.
The A75 speculation is maybe less than ideal, ARM must have a new core aimed at 7nm, not that you’ll see any 7nm SoCs before end of summer at best.
The AI accelerator is in collaboration with Cambricon, it’s not their own.
Anyway Antutu is the worst benchmark ever but it is GPU heavy so if the score is accurate, Huawei has a major GPU upgrade.