First Looks: Huawei’s Kirin 980 – Three New Features It Will Power On The Upcoming Huawei Mate 20

We’re all anxiously waiting on the edge of our seats for Huawei’s big reveal come October 16, 2018, because their not so secret Mate 20 is going to be glorious — we can feel it in our bones.

While Huawei has been frustratingly tight-lipped about the latest addition to their flagship line, we know it’ll be their first model to boast its very own Kirin 980 chipset, which is already making some big waves on the tech scene.

At only 7nm, the Kirin 980 has bagged a number of accolades with its exceptional performance. There’s a Chinese proverb for it, and it goes something like: A sparrow may be tiny, but it’s in possession of a complete set of organs… Okay, so maybe that doesn’t translate very well, but you get what we mean. The Kirin 980 is small but powerful, and it’ll come at all chipsets before it like David smacking the giant Goliath.

So with all the fanfare surrounding it, what can we expect it to bring to Huawei’s Mate 20 range?

Smoother Experience and Less Power Consumption

Equipped with 6.9 billion transistors, the world’s first Cortex-A76 based Central Processing Unit (CPU), Mali-G76 Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and Dual-Neural Processing Unit (NPU), Huawei claims that the Kirin 980 is going to deliver twenty percent speed improvement and forty percent power efficiency improvement on its predecessor. On top of that, its all-new CPU architecture — which touts two super cores for turbo performance, two large cores for sustained performance and four small cores for power efficiency — will enable a flex-scheduling mechanism that allocates CPU resource based on activity. This will work in tandem with Huawei’s AI loading prediction technology, which claims to predict application load with greater precision, thus allowing for a smoother experience on heavy-load applications while minimizing power consumption.

Real-Time Multi-Person Gesture Recognition

With the dual-NPU comes greater Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. The Kirin 980 is able to recognise 4500 images per minute, leagues ahead of the Snapdragon 845’s  2371 images per minute. And what this means for the Huawei Mate 20 range is more precise real-time object segmentation, objects recognition down to the particulars — as opposed to just the contours — and also real-time image processing on video capture. Phone photography and videography just got a very serious upgrade, which is definitely a score! for all your Instagram-influencing needs.

Faster Connectivity

Whether you’re chilling at home, jet-setting to a ski lodge in the alps or standing pressed up against the train doors during the morning rush-hour, you’ll still be able to enjoy seamless data connectivity with the world’s first 1.4Gbps Cat.21 smartphone modem packed into the Kirin 980. That’s not all, it also lays claim on the title of World’s Fastest Wifi Speed at 1732 Mbps (recorded on the Huawei Hi1103). From regular internet surfing to intense mobile-gaming, the Huawei Mate 20 range is going to make everything a breeze. It’s high time we said goodbye to those dratted long loading screens.

With all that we know at present, the Huawei Mate 20 is shaping up to look like a potent threat to our wallets. And we can’t wait to see what other surprises they’re going to throw our way on October 16, 2018. Mark your calendars, because it’s about to get real with Huawei. We can already hear their mic drop and they’re not even on the stage yet.