Huawei presented a new chipset for smartphones at the IFA with the HiSilicon Kirin 970. The Kirin 970 includes a processor, a graphics unit and a mobile radio modem. Especially in the modem, there is some progress compared to the predecessor – the Kirin 960. The Kirin 970 LTE Cat18 supports up to 1.2 GBit/s in the download. In addition, the dual SIM operation supports LTE on both SIM cards at the same time. The Kirin 970 chipset will be used in the Huawei Mate 10 smartphone, which will be presented in mid-October in Munich.
Modern LTE modem
The HiSilicon Kirin 970 is next to the first modem Qualcomm Snapdragon X20, which supports LTE category 18 of the downlink . Thus, speeds of up to 1.2 gigabits per second are possible in a correspondingly developed mobile radio network.
To achieve such high speeds, different 4.5G/LTE Advanced Pro technologies are combined. The Kirin 970 supports, for example, the 4 × 4 MIMO antenna technology and the 256QAM modulation technology. Furthermore, a frequency spectrum of up to 100 MHz can be bundled thanks to the 5CC CA (= five-factor carrier aggregation ).
There is also news about Dual SIM. So far, no smartphone was able to use both SIM slots on LTE at the same time. One of the two cards was therefore always limited to 2G / 3G usage, which is particularly annoying if only an LTE network is available. The Kirin 970 can now also run parallel in the LTE network on both SIM cards, so you can, for example, use the first SIM card to surf via LTE and use the VoLTE in the LTE network via the second card.
Processor, graphics and AI
The HiSilicon Kirin 970 is produced in the 10nm process and is to enable a better battery life than the previous model. An octa-core CPU and a 12-core GPU are integrated in addition to the described modem. The chipset should be particularly suitable for artificial intelligence applications (AI) and be faster and 50x more efficient than a classic quad-core CPU without a AI component through a combination of on-device AI and Cloud AI 25x.
