Yu Chengdong dissed several competing products at the press conference.

On September 6, Huawei released the Kirin 990 series chips at the IFA (Berlin International Consumer Electronics Show in Berlin) and Beijing (in video format).

The Kirin 990 series includes the Kirin 990 and the Kirin 990 5G. The latter is a 5G-oriented SoC, Huawei integrates its 5G baseband chip Baron 5000, which can use 5G network without plug-in, and supports SA/NSA (independent networking) And non-independent networking).

Huawei Consumer CEO Yu Chengdong said that the Kirin 990 series chip will be launched in Huawei’s Mate30 series, which will be released globally on September 19th in Munich, Germany.

Kirin 990 5G has created many industry firsts, including the first SoC supporting NSA/SA at the same time, the first 5G SoC with 7nm+ EUV (Ultraviolet Lithography), the first integration of 5G Modem into SoC In the chip, the board-level area is 36% smaller than other solutions in the industry. It integrates 10.3 billion transistors on a nail-sized chip. It is the 5G SoC with the largest number of transistors, the most complete function and the highest complexity.

According to the requirements of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, from January 1, 2020, 5G terminals applying for network access need to support both SA and NSA. The NSA is a transitional solution for the early 5G, and mature 5G terminals need to have the ability to support SA.

Kirin 990 continues the previous NPU design and added more cores. In 2017, Kirin 970 adopted the independent NPU neural network processing unit for the first time in the industry. The next year, the Kirin 980 was equipped with a dual-core NPU, which brought AI functions such as AI portrait color retention and calorie recognition. Kirin 990 goes one step further and adopts NPU dual-core + NPU micro-core computing architecture, taking into account high performance (large core) and low power (micro core).

Yu Chengdong Diss had several competing products at the press conference. He said that Company A does not have a 5G chip; Q Company (Qualcomm) has launched a 5G chip, but can only support NSA; Samsung’s 5G SoC is still a concept, not yet commercial.

One reality is that there are still some obvious problems in 5G terminal applications, including weak signals and high power consumption.

The signal is weak because there are fewer base stations in the initial stage of 5G network construction, and the coverage is not dense enough. Huawei overcomes 5G weak signals through intelligent uplink design, and uses 5G and 4G networks simultaneously in live video and short video uploads, and the upload rate is increased by 5.8 times.

Related industry insiders told The power problem is because 5G network speed is increased because the bandwidth is larger, so the power consumption will be faster. This can be solved step by step through software optimization, but it takes two to three generations of iterations. The current technical conditions can not make the mobile phone use 4G level. Huawei uses bandwidth allocation technology on this chip, which can reduce power consumption by 44% under light load data.

In the third quarter of this year, the first wave of 5G mobile phones will come. Huawei, ZTE, and vivo have all released 5G mobile phones in the Chinese market. Xiaomi and OPPO will also release 5G mobile phones. Among them, Mate 30, which will integrate the Kirin 990 series, is receiving much attention.

Xiang Ligang, a well-known observer in China’s communications industry, once said that in 2019, the shipment of 5G mobile phones in the entire Chinese market will be around 5 million units, but if Mate 30 is also a 5G mobile phone, it is likely that the entire market will ship. There will be over ten million units.