Mate 20 x Kirin 980: Dawn of A New Era for Huawei Smartphones

Huawei announced on September 1 that the new Huawei Mate 20 smartphone will be equipped with the newly released Kirin 980 chipset. The newest addition to the Mate family will be released on October 16 in London.

In a Weibo post on September 1, Huawei unveiled a photo showing the outlines of Mate 20 with the Kirin 980 embedded to announce the new combination. On September 3, Huawei released another post saying that this moment is “paying tribute to the past” and “witnessing the future”, signaling the end of the Kirin 970 era.

Kirin 980
Kirin 980

Kirin 980 is the newest chipset by Huawei recently announced at IFA 2018 in Berlin. At its launch, Huawei pointed out that the Kirin 980 took a team of over 1000 semi-conductor engineers 36 months to develop. The bolder claim is that the chipset holds at least six “world’s first” titles, including being the “word’s first 7nm SoC” and the “world’s first dual-NPU”.

Kirin 980 5G solution
Kirin 980 5G solution

The world-class chipset also sports the first Cortex-A76 based GPU which boosts mobile performance by 75 percent and power efficiency by 58 percent from Kirin 970, while its world’s first Mali-G76 GPU enhances performance by 46 percent and power efficiency by 178 percent.

Although the Huawei Mate20 series as well as the Honor Magic 2 will be the first smartphones to carry the powerful chipset, Kirin 980 will likely be used in many Huawei and Honor flagship products to come.