Huawei introduces flagship 5G SoC to power HUAWEI Mate 30 Series

Richard Yu, CEO of Huawei Consumer Business Group (CBG) has delivered a keynote speech titled "Rethink Evolution" at the IFA, and unveiled the latest flagship Kirin 990 series: Kirin 990 and its 5G version.

Richard says, “Kirin 990 (5G) is the world's first 5G SoC, and it will enable end users to access superb 5G connectivity experience one step ahead in the first year of 5G commercialization. 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.”

Kirin 990, which was unveiled with Kirin 990 (5G), is also designed to bring impressively elevated performance, energy efficiency, AI capabilities, and photography, offering better experiences to a more extensive group of 4G smartphone users.

Huawei’s Kirin 990 (5G) is the first 5G SoC in the world and supports the industry's most compact 5G smartphone solution. With the cutting-edge 7 nm+ EUV manufacturing process, Kirin 990 (5G) is integrated with a 5G modem, achieving a smaller area and lower power consumption. Moreover, Kirin 990 (5G) is the first full-frequency 5G SoC to support both non-standalone (NSA) and standalone (SA) architectures as well as TDD/FDD full frequency bands, enabling it to accommodate hardware requirements under diverse networks and networking modes. Based on Balong 5000’s excellent 5G connectivity capability, Kirin 990 (5G) provides a leading peak downlink rate of 2.3 Gbit/s and an uplink peak rate of 1.25 Gbit/s, delivering unmatched 5G experiences in the industry.

Kirin 990 (5G) is the first flagship SoC that packs a dual-core NPU built on the Da Vinci architecture, which comprise large NPU cores and tiny NPU cores. The large cores achieve high performance and power efficiency in heavy computing scenarios, while the tiny core structure, first in the industry, empowers ultra-low power consumption applications, fully tapping into the intelligent computing power brought by the innovative NPU architecture.

In terms of CPU, Kirin 990 features a three-level power efficiency structure, comprising of two ultra-large cores, two large cores, and four small cores, with a dominant frequency up to 2.86 GHz. In addition, Kirin 990 uses a 16-core Mali-G76 GPU and the new system-level Smart Cache for intelligent flow distribution, which can effectively save bandwidth and lower power consumption. For gaming experiences, Kirin 990 (5G) supports an upgraded Kirin Gaming+ 2.0 that enables efficient collaboration between hardware infrastructure and solutions, offering industry-leading smooth and fast gaming experience.

As for photography, Kirin 990 (5G) provides a brand-new ISP 5.0 that pioneers block-matching and 3D filtering (BM3D) professional-level hardware noise reduction (NR) for capturing brighter and sharper images in low light environments. It is also the first to use dual-domain video NR for more accurate noise processing for videos. In addition, the real-time video post-processing and rendering based on AI segmentation can adjust the image color frame by frame to bring cinematic quality.