The new iPhone will drop this September, but it may be worth holding onto your precious cash until October 16, the confirmed launch date of Huawei's new Mate 20, which could rival Apple's flagship as one of the best smartphones on the market.
The reason is Huawei's new chipset, Kirin 980, which was launched today by Huawei CEO Richard Yu at the global innovation show, IFA Berlin. The Kirin 980 is the world's first chipset fabricated on a 7nm process to offer more powerful and efficient performance.
Huawei phones are already well noted for their excellent power efficiency and camera capabilities, with some devices offering up to two days' battery life while the Huawei P20 Pro is hands-down the best smartphone camera on the market (with an award from TIPA to prove it). Huawei's flagship phones have also been traditionally more cost effective options than some, with the P20 Pro retailing at only $1,099 and the Huawei Mate 10 came in at under $1,000 on launch. Compared to iPhone X's $1,579 and the Samsung Galaxy S9's $1,199 that's pretty attractive.
What's so special about the Kirin 980?
As well as being the world's first 7nm chipset, the Kirin 980 comes with the world's first Cortex-A76 Central Processing Unit (CPU) for improved power and efficiency, a new dual image signal processor (ISP) for improvements in camera processing speed and power efficiency as well as the world's first dual Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to add more oomph to on-device AI.
At his IFA keynote address, Huawei CEO Richard Yu said the Kirin 980 will offer a 20% speed improvement and a 40% power efficiency improvement over its predecessor, the Kirin 970.
Smartphone gamers and photography buffs are the users most likely to benefit from the increase in power.
Graphics-heavy games will work faster and look better with an increased frame rate. In fact, according to tests performed by Huawei, phones with the Kirin 980 offer a gaming frame rate 22% faster and 32% more power efficient than phones with competitor chipset currently powering Samsung's flagship devices, the Snapdragon 845. Meanwhile, photographers will notice an improvement in noise reduction in their lowlight photography.
With the dual NPU Huawei's AI camera object recognition should become faster and more accurate. Huawei claims devices with the Kirin 980 can recognise 4,500 images per minute, nearly double Snapdragon 845's capabilities at 2,371 images per minute and almost 70% faster than Apple's A11 chipset at 1,458 images per minute. Meanwhile, real-time object segmentation should become more precise, while real-time image processing is now possible for video.
The CPU comes with a new architecture of two big Cortex-A76 based processors, two middle Cortex-A76 processors and and four little Cortex-A55 processors, allowing flex-scheduling for higher power efficiency. In English, that means that when you're doing something low power on your phone, the task will be handled by the little, power efficient processors, whereas more demanding tasks will be sent to the more powerful middle and big processors. All that means greater battery efficiency.
5G connectivity
Yu also announced today that Kirin 980-powered devices will ship with what he says is the world's first modem supporting LTE Cat.21 with a peak download speed of 1.4Gbps. This means the phones will be 5G ready. Not that it will be much use to Australians in October, unless you live on the Gold Coast where Telstra looks set to bring 5G live by the end of the year.
Jacqui Dent travelled to IFA Berlin with travel and accommodation costs contributed by Huawei.
Jacqui Dent
Editorial Strategist
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