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The most iconic of Huawei's Kirin chips should come to mind with the Huawei Mate 30 and Huawei Mate 30 Pro.The Huawei Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro are the classics of Huawei's Kirin chips, and both smartphones are powered by Huawei's Kirin 990 chip.
In the Kirin 990, Huawei has implemented a dual-SOC strategy, making a chip with a 5G modem for 5G smartphones and a chip for non-5G devices.
While the 5G modem is the main difference between these chips, there are differences in a few other areas as well. For example, the 5G version of the Kirin 990 is built using TSMC's 7nm+ (N7+) EUV process, while the 4G version is built using the same 7nm (N7) process used in the previous generation of Kirin 980 chips.
The Kirin 990 5G version has faster Hertz speeds and a better AI gas pedal thanks to the N7+ process. While the Kirin 990 5G's chip size of 113.31 mm² is larger than that of the Apple A13 Bionic and Snapdragon 855+, its 4G version is much smaller at 90 mm².
Huawei follows the same LPDDR4x RAM, Cortex-A76 CPU, and Mali-G76 GPU in the Kirin 990 as it did in the Kirin 980, but the CPU has a higher Hertzian speed and the graphics processing unit has more cores.
However, since these are last-generation hardware architectures, Huawei may have some difficulty competing with Samsung's Exynos 990 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 865.
Both SOCs come with LPDDR5 RAM and outperform the Kirin 990 in terms of CPU and GPU.Samsung's custom CPU cores and the Cortex-A77 cores in the Snapdragon 865 outperform the Kirin 990 on the CPU front, while it's a similar story in the GPU department, with the Qualcomm Adreno 650 in the Exynos 990 and the Mali-G77 GPU far ahead of the Mali-G76 GPU in the Kirin 990.
Compared to the Snapdragon 865 and Apple's A13 Bionic, Huawei's Kirin 990 chip shows a slight process advantage, utilizing TSMC's latest N7+ process, thus surpassing the N7P process used by the other two SOCs. In terms of detailed specifications, the chips have significant differences in process, CPU clock speed, NPU configuration and modem.
While the Cortex-A76 core cluster is clocked at the same speed on both chips, the other two clusters are clocked at different speeds, which could make the 5G version faster when dealing with lightweight applications.
On the GPU front, the chip comes with Mali's Mali-G76 MP16 GPU with a Hertz speed of 600 MHz. this is consistent for the chip, so expect the Kirin 990 to perform quite well when it comes to gaming and 3D performance.
Compared to the older Kirin 980, the Kirin 990 offers significant improvements in CPU Hertz speed (2.86 GHz vs. 2.60 GHz) and GPU core count (16 vs. 10), and the underlying architecture (Cortex-A76 and Mali-G76) remains the same. Huawei's improvement in this area is especially notable given that the older Kirin 980 was already lagging behind the Exynos 9820 and Snapdragon 855 in terms of performance.
The two chips differ in terms of NPU configuration, and AI performance is significantly improved. Both the Kirin 990 5G and 4G versions significantly outperform the Snapdragon 855+ in terms of AI performance.
However, AI has remained, and will continue to be, a major hotspot in the smartphone industry for some time. Although its applications are limited, such as scene detection and background blurring in the camera or facial recognition, this does not detract from its potential in the future. So, are you still using a phone with this chip?
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