Huawei to unveil Kirin 970 SoC with AI Unit, 5.5 billion transistors and 1.2 Gbps LTE speed at IFA 2017

To rival **Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835**  chipset, Huawei is planning to announce the **Kirin 970**  chipset at the IFA event in Berlin on 2 September. A report by Winfuture claims that the processor width has been reduced from 16 nm (present in Kirin 960)  to 10 nm which is the same as the Snapdragon 835. [caption id=“attachment_3996177” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Image Courtesy: WinFuture[/caption] The Kirin 970 has been reported to have 8 CPU cores with dual image-signal processors. It also has around 5.5 billion transistors on a 10X10 cm chip and this is 2 billion more than the Snapdragon 835 or the Apple A10 which has 3.1 billion and 3.3 billion transistors respectively. This, however, does not guarantee that a processor is faster as the Kirin 960 also had 4 billion transistors but failed to compete against the Snapdragon 835 SoC, claim XDA Developers. One of the most interesting features about the Kirin 970-is that it offers HiAI Mobile Computing Architecture which makes use of certain dedicated cores to provide AI features. According to the Winfuture report, the HiAI will be able to accomplish AI tasks about 25 times faster than any other normal CPU and utilise about 50 times less energy while doing so. With the HiAI, Huawei is trying to provide a “previously unseen” experience with artificial intelligence which can understand natural-language queries of the user, provide intelligent photography options, enable speech interaction and more. The Kirin 970 also has 12 GPU cores which are an upgrade from the 8 GPU cores held previously in the Kirin 960 SoC and might give some serious completion to Qualcomm’s Adreno 540 GPU.  The report claims that the octa-core Kirin 970 would most probably be divided into groups for the distribution of tasks with high and low processing requirement, using the  Arm big.LITTLE technology. There is no official announcement on the clock-speed of the CPU cores. An LTE modem which has been directly integrated into the Kirin 970 which can offer download speeds of up to a whopping 1.2 Gbps. In comparison, the Snapdragon 835 maxes out at 1 Gbps for downloads. However, download speeds are more often than not dependent on the signal strength of the service provider. Also these are theoretical numbers. The real world speeds are nowhere close to that. Currently, it looks like Huawei has planned to include the Kirin 970 SoC on its **Mate 10 smartphone** which is to be unveiled in Munich on 16 October.