Draft:Kirin 970 processor

The Kirin 970 chip is a next-generation chip launched by Huawei Hesse using TSMC's 10nm process, and is the world's first smartphone AI computing platform with a built-in standalone NPU (neural network unit).

Huawei's new chip, the Kirin 970, offers faster processing speeds and lower power consumption for the launch of its flagship Mate10 and other high-end phones.

Huawei unveiled its artificial intelligence chip Kirin 970 at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Berlin, Germany, on 2 September 2017. On 16 October of the same year, the first Huawei phone featuring the Kirin 970, the Mate 10, was officially launched in Munich, Germany.

Functional Features

Dedicated AI hardware processing unit

The biggest feature of the Kirin 970 chip is the creation of a dedicated AI hardware processing unit-NPU (Neural Network Processing Unit), which is used to process massive amounts of AI data.

Artificial Intelligence Strategy

After the release of Kirin 970, Huawei's terminal marketing should take "AI" as a prominent selling point, and start building an ecosystem around AI. In the era of artificial intelligence, the ideal situation is that intelligent terminals will become human assistants, truly realising "know you", "understand you" and "help you". This requires the continuous evolution of AI technology, not only passively responding to user needs, but also actively sensing the user's state and the surrounding environment, and providing accurate services in a new way of interaction.

Chip Parameters

In the past, mobile phone chips were generally based on the traditional computing architecture of CPU (Central Processing Unit)/GPU (Graphics Processor)/DSP (Digital Signal Processing) as the core, but this architecture is difficult to support AI massive data computation. For this reason, Kirin 970 has a single dedicated AI hardware processing unit, which reduces the burden on the CPU, GPU and other architectures, all for the purpose of improving application efficiency and reducing energy consumption.

The reasoning is the same as the original purpose of adding DSPs and other architectures in addition to CPUs and GPUs, which is to share the computational burden of the main system.

Huawei's Kirin 970's first integrated NPU uses the HiAI mobile computing architecture, which delivers significantly better AI performance density than the CPU and GPU. compared to four Cortex-A73 cores, the Kirin 970's new heterogeneous computing architecture delivers approximately 50x energy efficiency and 25x performance advantage when processing the same AI application task. This means that the Kirin 970 chip can perform AI computing tasks with a much higher energy efficiency ratio. For example, in image recognition speed, it can reach about 2,000 images per minute.

The Kirin 970 innovatively designs the HiAI mobile computing architecture, which utilises the most energy-efficient heterogeneous computing architecture to maximise the performance of the CPU/GPU/ISP/DSP/NPU, and for the first time, integrates a dedicated hardware processing unit for the NPU, which provides acceleration performance and energy-efficiency ratios that are dramatically superior to those of the CPU and GPU.

A system-level mobile phone chip mainly includes CPU/GPU/DSP/ISP, as well as baseband chips and many other components. This time, Kirin 970 still has a built-in octa-core CPU, which is unchanged from the previous generation Kirin 960. On the GPU, the Kirin 970 uses the Mali-G72 architecture, which was just released by ARM in May 2017, with improved performance compared to Mali-G71. In addition, in terms of the number of cores, the Kirin 970's GPU has been increased from the Kirin 960's 8 cores to 12 cores.

On the baseband chip, Huawei played to its strengths as a communications equipment vendor. The Kirin 970 directly supports LTE (4G) Cat.18 (network speed class) in a big way, with maximum download speeds of up to 1.2Gbps.

While there are no particularly big surprises in the CPU or GPU, the Kirin 970 will also boost overall performance thanks to its 10nm process. Yu said that the Kirin 970 has a 20 per cent improvement in energy consumption ratio.