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If the keyword released by Kirin 970 is AI capability, the key word released by Kirin 980 is 7nm process, then the key word released by Huawei Kirin 990 5G chip is the hot 5G.

According to Yu Chengdong, the Exynos 980 released by Samsung next door is a chip that integrates 5G baseband released on PPT. Then the Kirin 990 5G has a 7nm process technology and A76 architecture similar to last year’s Kirin 980. The meaning: this is the world’s first flagship 5G SoC chip.

There is almost no doubt that the Mate 30 series will be the first mobile phone with integrated 5G baseband SoC chip. The product has already preceded the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855+X50 baseband or the Huawei Kirin 980+ Barong 5000 baseband 5G. The phone is gone. From this perspective, Huawei’s progress on 5G technology and products can be said to be one step ahead.

Kylin 990 5G, main power and weak signal connection

Although at the press conference, Yu Chengdong highlighted that the Kirin 990 5G chip integrates the 5G baseband, and achieves 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G full Netcom, and also supports 5G NSA.And 5G SA two networking modes, but in fact, the specific situation of the 5G baseband in the Kirin 990 5G chip is very little.

The focus of the Kirin 990 5G chip in 5G is as follows:

• Achieving a 2.3Gbps peak download rate and a 1.25Gbps upstream peak rate in the Sub-6GHz band
• Support 5G dual card, one card 5G Internet access, another card can receive VoLTE HD voice call
• Compared with the traditional 4G SoC+5G Modem solution, the power consumption is 20% better

In fact, at the beginning of this year, the theoretical peak rate of the Barong 5000 5G baseband released by Huawei in the 5G network Sub-6GHz band, the download rate can reach 4.6Gbps, and the mmWave (millimeter wave) band peak download rate reaches 6.5Gbps.

So, here Huawei may be considering power consumption or chip area. It does not stack the 5G network capability of the Kirin 990 5G chip very high, and even does not add support for millimeter waves (it is not necessary).

Therefore, the main direction of the Kirin 990 5G chip becomes a weak signal connection and power consumption.

Huawei said that in the early stage of 5G commercialization, due to imperfect network coverage, 5G also faced challenges such as unstable connection of weak signal scenarios, high power consumption, and poor connection experience in high-speed mobile scenarios, affecting users’ online experience. For this reason, the Kirin 990 5G chip has launched an intelligent uplink shunt design in a scenario where the 5G signal is weak. The 5G and 4G networks are used in both live video and short video upload applications, and the upload rate is increased by 5.8 times.

To solve the power consumption problem caused by 5G, Kirin 990 5G chip is the first to support BWP (Bandwidth Part) technology, flexible switching of bandwidth resources under 5G large bandwidth conditions, compared with mainstream flagship chips in the industry, 5G power consumption Excellent performance of 44%; for high-speed mobile scenes, Kirin 990 5G supports machine-based adaptive receivers for more accurate channel measurement, with a 19% increase in downlink speed and a stable 5G connection.

Overall, when the 5G baseband is just beginning to be integrated into the SoC chip, the vendors are mainly considering the basic experience, rather than putting satellites on the theoretical data.

is still A76 architecture, CPU performance is slightly ahead of Snapdragon 855

After the release of the Kirin 990 5G chip, one of the industry’s guessesThe focus is whether it will use the A77 architecture or the A76 architecture on the big core.

In the end, Huawei still used the A76 architecture of the Kirin 980 launch last year on the Kirin 990 5G chip. However, the process, the Kirin 990 5G chip is still improving, this time using the 7nm + EUV process, the board area is 36% smaller than other solutions in the industry, a total of 10.3 billion transistors integrated on the chip.

Specific architecture, Kirin 990 5G uses two large cores (developed based on Cortex-A76) + two cores (developed based on Cortex-A76) + four small core (Cortex-A55) three energy efficiency architecture.

When the Kirin 980 was released last year, the main frequency of the big core was controlled at 2.6GHz, and the core frequency of the medium core was even below 2.0GHz. Now that the next generation has been updated, the frequency of the three cores has been improved. The highest frequency of the Kirin 990 5G chip is 2.86GHz.The main frequency is 2.35GHz, and the main frequency of the energy-efficient small core is 1.95GHz.

In comparison with the Snapdragon 855, the Kirin 990 5G chip has a small lead. Specific to the GeekBench 4.4 running score, Kirin 990 5G single core performance is 10% higher than the Xiaolong 855, multi-core performance is 9% higher, the specific running points are single core single core 3892, multi-core 12402.

In terms of GPU, the Kirin 990 5G chip is equipped with a 16-core Mali-G76 GPU. Huawei said that it has 6 cores compared to the Kirin 980 10-core Mali-G76 GPU, and the bandwidth is wider in large bandwidth scenarios such as heavy-duty games. The previous generation can save up to 15% and power consumption can be reduced by 12%.

Benefit areas ISP and AI capabilities are improving again

Since Kirin 970, Huawei has been focusing on AI performance, using the independent NPU neural network processing unit for the first time, and Huawei’s self-developed DaVinci architecture NPU on the Kirin 810 chip.

This time the Kirin 990 5G chip isFor the first flagship chip using Huawei’s self-developed DaVinci architecture NPU, the NPU dual-core + NPU micro-core computing architecture is adopted. The NPU large core exhibits performance and energy efficiency, and the micro-core NPU achieves ultra-low power consumption. For example, the industry’s first NPU micro-core (Ascend Tiny) in the face recognition application scenario, the NPU micro-core can be up to 24 times more energy efficient than the large core, which can make the AI ​​operation more power-saving.

Yu Chengdong said that compared with Qualcomm and Samsung’s SoC, the Kirin 990 5G chip has a performance advantage of up to 6 times and an energy efficiency advantage of up to 8 times.

At the scene, Huawei also demonstrated a case of AI computing power of Kirin 990 5G chip: Through AI multi-instance segmentation technology, each character body in the video picture can be separately identified to achieve multi-person video shooting replacement background. You can even select the characters you want to keep in the picture. At the same time, the AI ​​video super-score can restore the video quality of the old equipment based on the AI ​​capability of the Kirin 990 5G chip to achieve high-definition texture.

Huawei’s flagship mobile phone has long occupied the top position of the DxO camera capability list. Photographing has become one of the labels of Huawei mobile phones. This is related to the large-scale CMOS of Huawei’s flagship machine, and the research and development of the imaging team. Related, of course, and Kirin chipsRelated to ISP (Image Signal Processor).

This time, the Kirin 990 5G adopts the new ISP 5.0, with a 15% increase in throughput and a 15% improvement in energy efficiency. It fully optimizes video processing capabilities, especially video noise reduction.

The camera’s ability to take pictures in dark scenes is always the focus of users’ attention. Huawei said that this time they don’t kill SLR, but there is a new technology of “single shoulder SLR”: Kirin 990 5G chip realizes BM3D on mobile phone chip for the first time. (Block-Matching and 3D filtering) SLR-level hardware noise reduction technology, photo noise reduction ability increased by 30%, dark scenes less noise.

According to the convention, the end of the Kirin flagship chip conference will use a nine-square chart to hang Qualcomm, this time is no exception, but compared to last year’s slight friction, this time Qualcomm chip in Huawei PPT The performance can only be described by the Battle of the Five Dregs.

Looking forward to how the Snapdragon 865 will pull back a city next year.