HiSilicon, Huawei’s chip-making arm, has taken to IFA 2019 in Berlin, Germany, to unveil its next-generation System on Chip (Soc), the Kirin 990 Series which is offered in two flavors: a ‘standard’ version and a 5G variant. The latter is staking claim as the world’s first flagship 5G SoC powered with 7 nm+ EUV. It worthy to note that the non-5G 990 is manufactured with 7 nm technology, not the 7 nm+ EUV technology.
Now, we are not going all out geeky on this. All you may want to know that, with the 7 nm+ EUV technology, HiSilicon managed to pack over 10 billion transistors into a tiny chipset and the result is a SoC that touts as “industry’s only 5G NSA and SA (Non-Standalone and Standalone) solution” and promised high performance big-core NPU, real-time video AI re-rendering, dual-domain video noise reduction (which is also the world’s first, btw), and ultimate 16-core GPU graphics (all hail the 600 MHz Mali-G76 MP16 GPU!).
The GPU it touts is no doubt a mobile gamer wet dream, but it will be only as good as the cooling measure(s) implement or else throttling will only mar the gaming experience. Just saying… The real star here is clearly the 5G variant as unlike, current 5G chip, which is standalone from the SoC, it is one single chip and this lone chip itself allows the device to connect to 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G networks. In other words, HiSilicon basically stuff the Balong modem into the Kirin 990 5G which itself is quite some technological feat.
The Balong modem is expected to offer a theoretical peak download and upload speeds of 2.3 Gbps and 1.25 Gbps, respectively. Also expect more power (obviously, duh) but with “ultra-low consumption.” The new Kirin 990 Series chip is expected to debut in the upcoming Huawei Mate 30 Series which, in case you are interested to know, is rumored to be offered without Google services. Yes. Sadly.
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Images: Huawei.
