According to some sources near Huawei and in connection with the TSMC production line, it is claimed that Huawei is already starting the process of developing and constructing it’s Kirin 990. The next large in-house processor that would retain the 7 nanometers of the current Kirin 980 as well as other features such as the Dual NPU for machine learning and deep learning code processing.
Kirin 990 chipset 7 nm FinFET node under HiSilicon
Even though the Kirin 980 chipset was introduced just a few months ago, Huawei continues to work on another chipset that will use a 7 nm FinFET node. According to a report from China, the Kirin 990 chipset is already in preparation and will arrive in the first quarter of 2019. The major innovation regarding the Kirin 980 will be the special 5G modem for next-generation wireless connectivity speed.
Huawei prepares SoC Kirin 990 with dedicated 5G
According to industry sources, TSMC will manufacture the new chipset and Huawei subsidiary HiSilicon will invest more than $28 million in research and development considering the high testing costs. Like the Kirin 980 SoC, the Kirin 990 chipset is manufactured using the above 7 nm process and includes the Cortex A76 cores.
Although the overall architecture of the new chipset is the same as that of the Kirin 980 chipset, it is likely to be the company’s first processor to have the Balong 5000 modem certified for 5G speeds. In addition, the new chip is expected to deliver a 10% performance boost and consume 10% less power than its predecessor, which does not have a 5G modem. There is currently no further information available about the so-called chipset.
Since Huawei has not commented on the existence of this SoC, we will have to wait until further reports are published to see if this news is trustworthy. The recently introduced Kirin 980 provides some of the new Huawei and Honor phones, such as the Mate 20 and Magic 2.
It appears that the upcoming dedicated chips for mobile phones will all include support for 5G connections, which will offer smartphone users explosive Internet speeds.