Huawei Says Kirin 990 is its Most Powerful CPU Ever

Huawei, Like Samsung, makes its own ARM chips to rival the top offerings from Qualcomm and Apple. And the firm this week unveiled its most powerful ARM CPU ever, the Kirin 990. It looks like a beast, and it will ship in standard and 5G variants starting this month.

“Kirin 990 (5G) is the world’s first 5G System-on-a-Chip (SoC), and it will enable end-users to access superb 5G connectivity experience one step ahead in the first year of 5G commercialization,” Huawei Consumer Business CEO Richard Yu said in a prepared statement. “To meet users’ requirements for enhanced 5G experiences in the 5G era, Kirin 990 (5G) has been fully upgraded in terms of performance and power efficiency, AI computing, and ISP, extending mobile phone experiences to a new level.”

According to Huawei, Huawei’s Kirin 990 (5G) is the first 5G SoC in the world, the first full-frequency 5G SoC in the world, and the first mobile SoC with over 10 billion transistors. Thanks to its smaller 7 nm+ EUV manufacturing process, the Kirin 990 (5G) will help hardware makers create smaller 5G smartphones than are possible with Qualcomm silicon. And it delivers market-leading peak downlink rates of 2.3 Gbps and uplink peak rates of 1.25 Gbps.

From a performance perspective, the Kirin 990 series is the world’s most powerful ARM chipset, and it provides roughly 10 percent gains in both single-core and multi-core performance. The 8-core die consists of two ultra-large cores, two large cores, and four small cores, with frequencies of up to 2.86 GHz. It also includes a 16-core Mali G76 GPU.

The Kirin 990 is expected to debut soon in the Huawei Mate 30 Pro.