The Chinese company and Huawei has officially introduced the Kirin 970, the new flagship SoC from this smartphone maker that has built-in artificial intelligence capabilities.
And although the most common is to pay attention to aspects such as the configuration of the CPU and the GPU, Huawei has shown in its presentation to be especially interested in promoting the Kirin 970 as a mobile computing processor AI.
Huawei Kirin 970: faster and more efficient
The artificial intelligence platform runs on a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU), that is, a specific piece of hardware that, compared to the CPU of the 970, delivers up to 25 times higher performance with 50 times higher efficiency. In other words, the Kirin 970 NPU is capable of performing the same AI computing tasks but at higher speeds and with less power. For example, in an image recognition test, the Kirin 970 processes 2.000 images per minute, this is roughly 20 times faster than if the CPU had to do it alone.
We won't go into technical details about floating point operations, TFLOPs and other technicalities where even a server gets lost however it seems pretty obvious that Huawei has made an important qualitative leap creating a new SoC that, as far as artificial intelligence is concerned, is faster, with higher performance and more efficient as it requires less energy.
Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group, expressed the company's satisfaction by stating that "As we look to the future of smartphones, we are on the threshold of an exciting new era." He has also pointed out that, as part of that starting point, The Kirin 970 is the first in a series of new advancements which will bring powerful AI features to our devices and take them beyond the competition.
Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group
Other details of the Kirin 970 processor reveal that it is being manufactured by TSMC using a 10nm process. In addition, it is a Octa-core processor with a twelve-core GPU, dual ISP, and a high-speed Cat 18 LTE modem. The CPU is similar to that of the Kirin 960, with four ARM Cortex-A73 cores and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores, but this time with clock speeds of 2,4 GHz and 1,8 GHz, respectively. The Kirin 970 is also the first commercial SoC to use the Mali-G72, the latest GPU from ARM. According to Huawei, the implementation of the G72 will make the Kirin 970 a 20% faster than the Kirin 960 but still, it will be a 50% more efficient from an energy consumption point of view.
It also highlights its support for 4K video encoding and decoding (H.265, H.264, and others), the ability to handle 10-bit color (HDR10), and more. What's more, Huawei is opening the chip to developers and to its partners and for this, the Kirin 970 supports Tensorflow / Tensorflow Lite and Caffe / Caffe2.