Huawei could launch its flagship Kirin 980 chipset at IFA on 31 August

**Huawei** has begun sending out invites for its IFA 2018 keynote which is expected to happen on 31 August. No smartphones are expected to be launched, but the Chinese telecom giant is very likely going to launch its flagship chipset, the Kirin 980, at the event. [caption id=“attachment_4774731” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”] Representative Image.[/caption] According to a report by GSMArena, Huawei had unveiled the HiSilicon Kirin 970 at IFA last year and this year will stick to that pattern and announce its successor. We won’t be seeing an Honor device either as the sub-brand is holding its own event on the same date in Berlin. In fact, the invite also reveals that the keynote in itself will be just 45 minutes long which is too little to launch a new chipset and additional hardware. As far as the new Kirin 980 chipset is concerned, the report states that it will feature eight cores, in a big.LITTLE cluster. Rumours also suggest that an ‘ARM Cortex A77’ core will be part of the mix but such a core does not exist yet unless ARM decides to announce something new. [caption id=“attachment_4860171” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”] Huawei’s IFA invite. Image: GSMArena[/caption] Huawei is expected to incoporate better GPU performance by a huge margin on the Kirin 980, with claims that it will beat the Adreno 630 by a massive 50 percent. The GPU will also likely be Huawei’s first in-house design. As far as efficiency goes, the Kirin 980 is said to be among the first to be built on TSMC’s 7 nm process. Huawei will also very likely throw in a dedicated NPU (neural processing unit) into the chip for AI applications to utilise.