Slated to be the first 7nm processor
As we wait for the Mate 20 come 4th Quarter of 2018, new details of its alleged processor—Huawei’s in-house Kirin 980—have emerged. Judging from the info obtained, it is slated to be a beastly processor.
To start off, the Kirin 980 will be manufactured using a 7nm process—the first ever to do so— which means better power efficiency is expected compared to the Kirin 970. As for the cores, the Kirin 980 will be equipped with four yet-to-be-announced Cortex-A77 cores rated at 2.8Ghz and four Cortex-A55 cores. Overall clock speed is rated at 2.8Ghz, making the Kirin 980 on par with the Snapdragon 845 speed-wise.
The GPU gets an upgrade with a Mali-G72 MP24. The new GPU has double the cores compared to the Kirin 970’s Mali-G72 MP12, which should indicate better graphics processing power—a known weakness of Kirin processors.
Other features include support for 4K displays, support for three Image Signal Processors, and a next-generation NPU processor. All three features fuel speculation at the possible features of the Mate 20 which include a P20 Pro-like triple rear camera system.
