Following the success of the Kirin 960 on the P10 and P10 Plus, Huawei has just unveiled its newest flagship SoC, the Kirin 970. And while it does offer a number of notable bumps from its predecessor, Huawei seems to be hyping up its AI capabilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k566SwWDlc
The AI Platform in the Kirin 970 runs on a dedicated Neural Processing Unit that delivers up to 25 times the performance with 50 times greater efficiency of the 970’s CPU. This means it can perform the same AI tasks faster and with less power consumption.
The Kirin 970 is an octa-core CPU built on the 10nm process. It’s coupled with a 12-core GPU, dual ISPs, and an LTE Cat 18 modem. The CPU itself is basically the same as the 960, using four 1.8GHz high-efficiency A53 cores and four 2.4GHz high power A73 cores.
The 970 is also the first commercial SoC to make use of the latest Mali-G72 GPU from ARM, which is touted to yield 20 times faster performance than the 960, while at the same time, being 50% more power efficient.
There’s also support for 4K video encoding/decoding, HDR 10 capability, Huawei’s latest sensor processor, and a 32-bit/384K DAC. The 970 also supports dual cameras, UFS 2.1, and a higher LPDDR4 RAM speed of 1833MHz.
The Kirin 970 supports Tensorflow, Tensorflow Lite, Caffe, and Caffe2. Developers will be able to explore the chip and come up with more innovative uses of its AI capabilities.
Sources: Huawei via YouTube, Android Authority
Emman has been writing technical and feature articles since 2010. Prior to this, he became one of the instructors at Asia Pacific College in 2008, and eventually landed a job as Business Analyst and Technical Writer at Integrated Open Source Solutions for almost 3 years.
