Source: MCA Mobile Alliance
There have been many stories about HiSilicon in the industry, one of which is quite interesting: when Mr. Ren decided to establish HiSilicon, he set two goals for the entire team: first, to achieve revenue of over 3 billion, and second, to have more than 3,000 employees. Undoubtedly, the second goal was quickly achieved, but since HiSilicon was founded in 2004, its revenue has been questioned by the outside world.
As of today, with the rapid growth of Huawei’s consumer terminals, HiSilicon’s revenue has long surpassed this target. We can see from IDC’s 2018 Q2 data that Huawei’s smartphone sales have surpassed Apple, ranking second globally; it has also been confirmed that the Kirin 980 chip will be released at the IFA exhibition on August 31.
There is no doubt that Huawei has established a foothold in the high-end smartphone market, and every year’s updates of the P series and Mate series are bound to be major events in the industry and the smartphone market. While Huawei smartphones are making great strides, we must not forget that the Kirin chips are also thriving. Some say that the Kirin chips have made Huawei smartphones successful, but it is also the strong revenue from Huawei smartphones that provides the capital and motivation for the continued evolution of Kirin chips; the two are actually complementary.
There are many factors that have contributed to the achievements of Huawei’s mid-to-high-end smartphones, but the rise and growth of Kirin chips are key. This small Kirin chip has gone through many stages from its inception to becoming the mainstream flagship chip for mobile devices today.
The need for self-developed chips as a stepping stone in the high-end market
According to the latest IDC report, Apple is lagging behind China’s Huawei in smartphone sales, and the overall global smartphone market declined by 1.8% in the second quarter of 2018. Apple ranks third, Huawei second, and Samsung first.
It can be seen that the top three positions have been basically solidified by Samsung, Apple, and Huawei, yet they all share a commonality, which is that each possesses the capability to develop their own chips. Although the smartphone industry is now very mature, producing a decent smartphone is not particularly difficult. However, making it well and differentiating it in this homogenized market is another matter; chips are one of the important identifiers and also a symbol of a company’s research and development strength, as well as an important bargaining chip in marketing.
Samsung has always had impressive self-developed processors, with the Exynos series chips representing high performance in the market; Apple has used its own A-series chips since the iPhone 4, and now the A11 in the iPhone X has undergone seven generations of evolution; Huawei was first known for its K3V2 chips launched in 2012, which were first used in its flagship models D2, P2, and Mate1. Now, in August 2018, the Kirin 980 is about to be released, having gone through six years of growth.
Although the Kirin 980 has not been officially released, information about its configuration specifications has already been leaked. The Huawei Kirin 980 adopts TSMC’s 7nm process technology, with a CPU comprising 4 A77 cores and 4 A55 cores, and a maximum clock frequency of 2.8GHz; the GPU is developed by Huawei, with performance approximately 1.5 times that of Adreno 630 (Snapdragon 845).
In terms of baseband, earlier this year, Huawei released the 4.5G baseband Balong 765, supporting cat19, with a maximum download speed of 1.6Gbps. Meanwhile, the Kirin 980 will incorporate the second-generation Cambricon NPU 1M, significantly enhancing AI performance. Of course, GPU Turbo graphics acceleration technology will also be included, which can improve the chip’s graphics processing capability and reduce power consumption, compensating for deficiencies in the GPU.
From the configuration standpoint, the Kirin 980 is already a top-tier product in the chip market, regardless of CPU, GPU, baseband, AI, or co-processing cores; it has the capability to challenge any competitor.
It is clear that the Kirin 980 will inevitably be the standard configuration for Huawei’s Mate 20 flagship this year. The annual arms race of flagship upgrades, with flagship high-end chips accompanying flagship products, has become a norm, even a major factor determining whether flagship products are competitive.
Keywords: communication, accumulation
When talking about Kirin chips, one must mention the company that designs them, HiSilicon. HiSilicon is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Huawei. In 1991, Huawei established an ASIC design center, which can be seen as the predecessor of HiSilicon. The ASIC design center primarily designed chips for Huawei’s communication equipment. After years of accumulation and innovation, Huawei’s technology and patents in communication have made significant progress, which is also the competitive advantage of Huawei in the carrier market.
Around the year 2000, the world gradually began to enter the 3G era, and Huawei also sought to gradually launch 3G network chips in response to the demands of European carriers. Thus, HiSilicon Semiconductor Company was established in 2004. At that time, Europe was primarily promoting WCDMA, so Huawei’s focus was also on that.
Due to the accumulation of communication technology and deep cooperation with carriers, the internet using HiSilicon’s 3G chips has achieved success worldwide, entering top global carriers such as Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, and NTT DoCoMo, with cumulative sales of nearly 100 million units. What an achievement! This means that Huawei HiSilicon and the giants of the 3G chip field at that time, Qualcomm, each held half of the market share. The profound accumulation in the communication field seems to have smoothly provided the impetus for HiSilicon to further promote the development of application processors.
The HiSilicon team primarily engages in three parts of the business: system equipment business, mobile terminal business, and external sales portion.
The external sales mainly consist of security chips and set-top box chips, which hold a high market share in China’s security field, well exceeding Texas Instruments. Of course, the revenue scale of this part of the business is indeed not large.
The largest team serves the system equipment, followed by the mobile terminal service. The Kirin chip is the product of the mobile terminal team within HiSilicon. Relevant personnel from HiSilicon stated: although the team’s scale is still not large compared to MediaTek and Qualcomm, the number of people responsible for communication baseband chip technology is already comparable to MediaTek. Therefore, Huawei’s communication background and accumulation have helped HiSilicon catch up in mobile baseband chip development.
In fact, we can see that before the Kirin 950, HiSilicon did not hold a high-profile press conference or media communication for its chips, which shows that the HiSilicon team has always taken a low-key approach, rarely disclosing information externally; even if they have strength, they maintain an attitude of not competing with the world.
2012: Entering the Era of Quad-Core High Performance
Keywords: A9 architecture
HiSilicon actually launched its first application processor, the K3V1, in 2009, which featured high cost performance, low power consumption, high integration, multi-wireless standard fusion, and operator value-added characteristics, mainly targeting the mid-to-low-end market. To ensure that customers can quickly mass-produce, HiSilicon even provided a complete set of production testing solutions. Unfortunately, K3V1’s target customers were a series of mid-to-low-end manufacturers, which we referred to as shanzhai manufacturers at the time, and this did not significantly contribute to its development.
To say that HiSilicon’s heavy-hitting move was the launch of the quad-core processor K3V2 at the 2012 MWC in Barcelona. K3V2 was the smallest high-performance quad-core A9 architecture processor in the industry at the time, the second quad-core A9 processor in the industry after NVidia Tegra3. At the same time, Huawei announced that it would use this processor in its flagship Ascend D, which required a lot of courage to use a chip with no commercial experience in its own product.
From a market perspective, the Huawei Ascend D high-end smartphone was first launched in the Chinese market in August 2012, then distributed to Europe, Asia-Pacific, Australia, North America, South America, and the Middle East, achieving remarkable results.
Many people say that the mobile industry has traveled the path of the PC industry in just a few years, which may be exaggerated, but it is not without reason. The most obvious feature of mobile chips is the rapid entry into the multi-core era, which is closely related to the need for better power control in mobile terminals.
Smartphones have limited volume, and the space contradiction of various components and batteries has always existed, so power control becomes extremely important. The purpose of multi-core design, or big.LITTLE design, is to let each core perform its own task. It can be seen that heterogeneous design is also a trend in multi-core development, ultimately aiming to achieve a balance between power consumption and performance.
In 2012, when single-core designs were still common, the quad-core battle began, and HiSilicon launched the quad-core K3V2 ahead of the mobile field giants TI and Qualcomm, which caused quite a stir.
Let’s take a look at the specifications of K3V2, which adopted a 40nm process, four A9 cores, with frequency options of 1.2GHz and 1.5GHz. The low frequency is responsible for low-load work, while the high frequency is responsible for complex calculations, with DVFS dynamic voltage frequency adjustment, which was already a prototype of later 8-core big.LITTLE scheduling.
In fact, K3V2’s quad-core design was already quite advanced at the time, but unfortunately, it used a relatively rare GPU from Vivante, the GC4000, manufactured using TSMC’s 40nm process.
Manufacturing processes and this GC4000 GPU encountered compatibility issues in applications, leading to a series of power consumption problems in K3V2, while frequently encountering errors in the application layer. I still vividly remember that the Ascend D smartphone frequently encountered software crashes and incompatibility prompts.
Keywords: LTE Cat.4
The emergence of K3V2 attracted industry attention towards Huawei and HiSilicon, and the K3V2 achieved some success that year, but its shortcomings were also quite evident.
HiSilicon was aware of some of the design application shortcomings of K3V2, and subsequent research and development addressed K3V2’s weaknesses, with its successor being the first to bear the name “Kirin,” the Kirin 910.
From the previous internal code names like K3V2 to the new brand name “Kirin” entering the market, it is evident that HiSilicon has made a determination to fully promote this brand. After being silent for many years, HiSilicon realized that it was time to promote its chips comprehensively.
Kirin is a transliteration of Kirin; when the Chinese brand came out, many people directly associated it with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. Both Kirin and dragon are quite characteristic of China, as they are regarded as mythical beasts in ancient Chinese mythology, and this conveyed to outsiders that Kirin was ready to take on Snapdragon.
Regardless of whether HiSilicon intended this or not, from a product perspective, Kirin chips still had a certain gap to challenge the industry leader Qualcomm’s Snapdragon.
The Kirin 910 was improved based on K3V2; let’s take a look at the specific configurations, with a 28nm process and replacing the Mali 450MP4 GPU, while the CPU still used a 4-core A9. It can be seen that the Kirin 910 continued the quad-core design of K3V2, while improvements and upgrades were made in GPU and process.
Looking at it this way, the Kirin 910 seems to be a smooth and conservative upgrade; however, I believe we overlooked one point, which is network connectivity—baseband.
In 2012, Huawei HiSilicon released the LTE 4G chip Balong 700, which became the chip for internet cards and home appliance wireless gateways, providing it to customers in the US and Europe. At the MWC in 2012, in addition to releasing K3V2, HiSilicon also launched the industry’s first multi-mode LTE terminal chip Balong 710 that supports 3GPP Release 9 and LTE Cat4, with a downstream rate of 150M, supporting five modes and internationally common frequency bands. However, K3V2 did not integrate the baseband; it used the external Balong baseband, and it was not until the Kirin 910 that Balong 710 was first integrated.
HiSilicon’s ability to launch K3V2 and Balong 710 surprised analysts who had long analyzed semiconductor chips, stating, “Only Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Spreadtrum can provide such a high degree of completion for chipsets.”
The high integration of mobile processor SoCs will be a trend; we can see that in the past, companies designing mobile chips included not only the current giants Samsung, Apple, Huawei, Qualcomm, and MediaTek, but also TI, Nvidia, Intel, etc. However, why are only a few of these companies able to remain in the mobile market? They have all encountered network connectivity issues, namely baseband problems.
In fact, regarding basebands, many people believe that anyone engaged in carrier business and communications can do it well. However, this is not so simple. Companies like Ericsson and Nokia in the communication equipment field have also attempted to enter this industry, such as ST-Ericsson. However, they ultimately exited this fiercely competitive mobile chip market.
As we transitioned from the 3G to the 4G era, different standards and frequency bands posed significant challenges for these baseband manufacturers, especially in China, where the 4G communication environment is the most complex, including TD-SCDMA, WCDMA, CDMA in the 3G era, and TD-LTE, FDD-LTE, and complex frequency bands in 4G, all indicating that the entire communication baseband module is challenging to produce.
HiSilicon’s ability to overcome difficulties in the baseband field has laid a solid foundation for future development, and the integration of Balong 710 in the Kirin 910 is its killer feature, supporting LTE Cat.4 multi-mode with a downstream speed of up to 150Mbps, even leading Qualcomm at the time.
The technological accumulation in communication has gradually become apparent, and when Huawei’s smartphones began, they were positioned towards business professionals, who have high demands for call quality.
Due to in-depth cooperation with various carriers globally, the Kirin 910 supports various voice solutions under LTE communication modes such as CSFB, SGLTE/SVLTE, VoLTE/eSRVCC. Its mobile products can provide business professionals with confidence in call quality, stability, and extensive roaming capabilities, which is the foundation for Huawei’s baseband communication advantages.
The Huawei Kirin 910 chip replaced the GC4000 with the Mali 450MP4, using the then-mainstream 28nm HPM process, effectively solving compatibility and power consumption issues. From the perspective of Huawei P7 and Mate 2, it gained market recognition.
2014: Kirin Chips Enter the 8-Core Era
Keywords: 8-core, LTE Cat.6
Based on the experiences of K3V2 and Kirin 910, Huawei HiSilicon gradually understood user needs, accelerating the development of the next generation of products. The Kirin 920 series can be said to have led Huawei’s mobile terminals and HiSilicon into a new phase.
If we talk about Kirin 920, we must mention the Huawei Mate 7, which became a hit product for Huawei that year and a representative of Huawei’s true entry into the high-end market, closely tied to the success of Kirin 920.
The Kirin 920 is the world’s first commercially available SoC supporting LTE Cat.6, adopting a big.LITTLE architecture, integrating four ARM Cortex A15 cores and four ARM Cortex A7 cores, while the GPU selected is Mali T628MP4, with improvements in both CPU and GPU. It still uses the mature 28nm HPM process, integrating Huawei’s Balong 720 released in 2013, becoming the world’s first SoC chip supporting LTE Cat.6, with a maximum downstream rate of 300Mbps and an upstream rate of 150Mbps.
In terms of configuration parameters, the Kirin 920 is a significant upgrade over the Kirin 910, being the first to adopt an 8-core big.LITTLE architecture (4×Cortex-A15 1.8GHz + 4×Cortex-A7 1.3GHz combination).
big.LITTLE is a solution proposed by ARM to balance performance and power consumption issues. In low-load scenarios, the big cores are turned off to use the small cores, reducing power consumption and thus improving battery life. After all, in daily use, most smartphones operate under low load, and only the i3 co-processor runs in lower load situations.
Thanks to the strong performance of the Kirin chip, the Huawei Mate 7 features a large battery and a big.LITTLE architecture, resulting in excellent battery life. Additionally, features like dual SIM design and excellent communication capabilities have made it very popular among business professionals, leading to a situation where it was hard to find after its launch.
In fact, we can also see the influence of the Kirin 920 series chips on the Huawei Mate 7, one of which is the support for pressure-sensitive fingerprint recognition. After the launch of the iPhone 5S in September 2013, the Android camp followed suit, with various companies launching smartphones equipped with fingerprint recognition. However, the actual experience was not very good; for example, Samsung’s sliding unlock had a low recognition rate, and HTC’s fingerprint recognition raised security issues.
The fingerprint recognition design of the Mate 7 is similar to that of the iPhone, based on ARM’s TrustZone, which is a chip-level security feature.
Since the Huawei Mate 7 chip is self-developed, it is easier and more autonomous to design TrustZone. The user’s fingerprint data is not stored in the phone’s storage space in an unencrypted form or shared, but is uniformly stored in the chip’s independent security area, ensuring the security of the Mate 7’s fingerprint recognition.
Moreover, the unlocking speed experience is also quite good. Huawei Mate 7 product director Li Xiaolong stated, “The Kirin chip has a secure area, and its processing capability is much weaker than that of the larger processor outside, its computational efficiency is not as good, but to improve computational efficiency, Huawei has optimized the unlocking time to be less than 1 second.”
The experience of Huawei’s fingerprint recognition also requires support from the Kirin chip system; do not forget that it is also the first mobile terminal supporting LTE Cat.6.
In 2013, HiSilicon launched the world’s first LTE-A Cat6 platform. During the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, LTE CPE Cat6 products based on the HiSilicon platform assisted Russia’s largest operator MegaFon in launching LTE-A networks. The Kirin 920 series ultimately integrated the LTE Cat.6 baseband, which had been commercially validated.
The Kirin 920 generation product should be a sign of HiSilicon’s maturity and the beginning of its entry into the mainstream market. The Huawei Mate 7, as a representative, can meet the daily performance needs of most individuals, while its good power consumption and multi-core scheduling provide excellent battery life, satisfying the needs of business professionals. Additionally, its camera, fingerprint recognition, and network communication capabilities are also outstanding.
The Kirin 920 made the Huawei Mate 7 a success and enabled Huawei to secure a foothold in the 3000 yuan market, entering the high-end smartphone ranks.
Keywords: 20nm A57 architecture
After the success of the Kirin 920, the Kirin 930 was officially released in March 2015, integrating 8-core A53, still using 28nm process technology. Overall, it was merely a small upgrade over the Kirin 920, achieving a smooth transition. Behind this upgrade seems ordinary, but in fact, the HiSilicon team underwent considerable internal ideological struggles and choices.
In 2014, Qualcomm chose a 20nm process to manufacture the Snapdragon 810, which seems to have caused no issues. Mobile phone chips have become the high ground for product market promotion every year. From the industry’s environment at that time, according to the technological evolution, leading manufacturers in the industry must pursue higher performance, which would make their choices in process and cores more aggressive.
In the mobile processor industry in 2014, the 28nm process had already matured, and the next generation of processes to be seen at that time was the 20nm. Meanwhile, ARM also needed to accelerate the update of its cores, leading to the emergence of the A57 core, which offered 50% higher performance than the previous generation.
However, this combination produced a fatal power consumption issue; although there is no authoritative certification indicating that the combination of 20nm and A57 is the culprit for overheating, third-party tests have shown that at certain temperatures, A57 cores encountered overheating issues and throttled. At the time, the industry widely believed that the serious overheating of Snapdragon 810 was largely related to the choice of A57 architecture and 20nm manufacturing process.
This incident illustrates that upgrading architecture and process does not guarantee that more powerful cores will fit; it is not as simple as we outside perceive; it requires in-depth research and validation.
Whether it was luck or other reasons, HiSilicon did not adopt the A57 core for the Kirin chip, and during that long year, as mentioned above, the Kirin 930 conservatively adopted an 8-core A53 design, still using the 28nm process. For a flagship chip, this was considered “unforgivable” in the market at the time. The Huawei P8 and P8 Max equipped with the Kirin 930, recalled experiences, were quite laggy, giving the impression that they could not be considered high-end flagship phones, which was largely related to the insufficient efficiency of the A53.
Later, in an interview, Huawei Fellow Ai Wei mentioned to the media that the chip planning for mobile phones is not always so easy, sometimes it may require annual process upgrades, while other times it may take 2-3 years without changing processes. The real challenge is not Tick-Tock, but bringing new value to consumers; they do not care about these things.
Indeed, most consumers do not pay attention to chip configurations; they care more about the experience. If the experience is poor or fatal, it will have a negative impact on the company. Although Ai Wei’s description indicates that Huawei had some luck, I believe that when faced with technological choices, the internal ideological struggles and final decisions were still made after careful consideration.
2015: Kirin Reborn, Strengthening Photography
Keywords: 16nm A72 architecture
After avoiding the A57, Huawei HiSilicon had early cooperation with TSMC, planning to launch the next generation of Kirin flagship processor in the second half of 2015. In November 2015, the specifications of the Kirin 950 were announced (directly integrating 4 ARM Cortex A72 cores and 4 ARM Cortex A53 cores, adopting the world’s most advanced TSMC 16nm FF+ process).
Some may ask where the Kirin 940 went? After the Kirin 930 was released, there were various predictions regarding the next generation of Kirin (Kirin 940), and it was rumored that the next generation Nexus would adopt it. However, the Kirin 940 did not ultimately come to market; discussions with HiSilicon personnel confirmed that there was no disclosure regarding Kirin 940’s plans. It can be confirmed that Huawei must have developed the Kirin 940 internally, but it was not released to the market due to market and technological immaturity.
Regardless of whether the Kirin 940 existed, the launch of the Kirin 950 would symbolize the rebirth of Kirin chips, and from this generation onward, the update cycle of Kirin chips would be every fall, synchronized with the Mate series. This would enable it to lead competitors by at least a season, as the Snapdragon 820 would not be released until early 2016.
The Kirin 950 adopted TSMC’s 16nm FF+ process, with transistor density twice that of the previous generation; integrating 4 cores at 2.3GHz A72 + 4 cores at 1.8GHz A53, the GPU was the new Mali T880 mp4, with a frequency of 900MHz. According to Huawei’s published information, the performance of A72 is 11% better than A57, and power consumption is reduced by 20%; TSMC’s 16nm FF+ is an enhanced version of standard 16nm FinFET, with better performance and power consumption than the latter. Additionally, the Kirin 950 also featured an i5 co-processor, and importantly, this generation of chips adopted Huawei’s self-developed ISP for significantly enhancing photo-taking experiences.
Starting from the Kirin 950, its use in the Huawei Mate 8 brought a noticeable change, namely the adoption of a self-developed ISP module, integrated into the SoC. The self-developed ISP module allows Huawei to optimize photo processing from the ground up, resulting in beautiful images.
The process of smartphone photography generally involves: light passing through the lens to the sensor, converting light signals into electrical signals; the electrical signals converted by the sensor are processed by the ISP and stored as digital photos. The sharpening, noise reduction, color optimization, etc., that we often refer to in photos are all completed in the ISP. In addition, today’s ISPs also bear the responsibility for implementing phase, laser, contrast, and other hybrid focusing calculations, as well as providing support for dual-camera configurations.
The power of the self-developed ISP began to show when Huawei launched the P9 in 2016, where Huawei partnered with Leica to launch a dual-camera smartphone, making the German flavor popular. At that time, it was quite difficult to achieve breakthroughs in smartphone photography, and the搭载徕卡双摄 was a selling point, also gaining some experience and technology from Leica’s later image processing algorithms. However, just having a Leica dual-camera is not enough; the role of the self-developed ISP is significant.
In fact, starting from the P9, Huawei smartphones have gradually entered the first tier of smartphone photography, including subsequent models like P10, P20, Mate 9, Mate 10, which have all ranked in the top tier on professional camera evaluation websites DXO, with the most outstanding being the P20 series, where the P20 and P20 Pro have broken the 100-point barrier, leading the pack.
In terms of baseband, Huawei has always had a strong voice; however, the Kirin 950 conservatively integrated the Balong 710 from the previous year, adhering to the principle of being sufficient. This is somewhat regrettable.
However, HiSilicon also showcased the Balong 750 at the press conference, supporting LTE Cat.12 and Cat.13 UL network standards, with theoretical download speeds of up to 600Mbps and upload speeds reaching 150Mbps. This indicates that HiSilicon is not lacking in baseband communication reserves; rather, it has always adopted a relatively conservative approach, considering market and cost technologies.
Analyst Pan Jiutang stated: “The most critical advantage of the Kirin 950 is its timing, leading Qualcomm 820 and Samsung M1 by at least a season, creating a time advantage.” Therefore, while the Kirin 950 may not have a direct advantage over the Snapdragon 820, its time advantage allows it to lead by at least a season. Of course, whether the Kirin 950 directly competes with the Snapdragon 820 and Samsung M1 is still uncertain; these are more of media and market exaggerations, while Huawei internally set this time point for release and shipment, believing it was more about fulfilling its terminal product release needs.
Choosing the right process is not only a positive factor for product advancement, but also a key to ensuring smooth mass production. You may have better technology, but the market does not wait; without products, there is no voice.
In October 2016, Huawei chips launched the Kirin 960 chip, which is considered another milestone for Huawei chips. The Kirin 960 was the first to equip ARM Cortex-A73 CPU cores, with the small core being A53, forming a big.LITTLE combination of four large and four small cores, with a GPU of Mali G71 MP8. Compared to the previous generation, its CPU efficiency improved by 15%, while graphics processing performance increased by 180%, and GPU efficiency improved by 20%. In terms of storage, it supports LPDDR4 and UFS2.1, claiming a 90% improvement in DDR performance and a 150% improvement in file encryption read/write performance.
It can be seen that compared to the Kirin 950, the Kirin 960 did not significantly enhance the CPU part, as the A73 equipped is slightly better than A72, but the performance and efficiency improvement in the GPU section is very noticeable. Additionally, specifications like LPDDR4 and UFS 2.1 storage have also been supported.
The most crucial aspect is that the Kirin 960 did not take overly aggressive choices in IP selection and process selection, still adopting the latest optimized A73 architecture from ARM, along with TSMC’s 16nm FinFET Plus process, ensuring the performance and power consumption of the processor without worrying about mass production issues.
Launching ahead of the Snapdragon 835, it still gained a first-mover advantage, as the Snapdragon 835 was released in early 2017, but delayed in mass production due to Samsung’s 10nm process issues.
Why is the Kirin 960 considered a milestone product for Huawei HiSilicon? Because it possesses top configurations in the market while being a product that has received full market validation and recognition. The upgrade of the Kirin 960 is comprehensive, addressing the shortcomings of the Kirin 950 baseband, directly inheriting the Balong 750 baseband, supporting four-carrier aggregation (4CC CA), with peak download speeds reaching 600Mbps, achieving LTE Cat.12; it also supports multi-band dual-SIM roaming for 2G/3G/4G without needing to change phones for smooth communication in more places around the world.
Most importantly, Huawei has integrated CDMA into the Kirin chip for the first time, thus gaining full network capabilities. This allowed Huawei’s full network mobile phones to break free from the so-called “telecom curse,” as Huawei was not lacking in CDMA technology; rather, it previously did not have sufficient patent and technical reserves in CDMA. Adding CDMA to Balong is not difficult; the challenge lies in the complex cross-licensing agreements behind it, which Huawei has resolved well in the Kirin 960.
The Kirin 960 achieved impressive results, being selected by the US tech media Android Authority as the “Best Android Smartphone Processor of 2016.” At the 2017 World Mobile Congress and Mobile Terminal Industry Conference, the Huawei Kirin 960 won the Product Technology Advancement Award, while the Huawei flagship P10 equipped with the Kirin 960 also won the Outstanding Contribution Award in the smartphone industry. At the 2016 World Internet Conference, the Kirin 960 was recommended as a “Leading Technological Achievement in the World Internet.”
The Huawei Kirin 960 has propelled Huawei HiSilicon to a new height, as evidenced by the warm market response to the Huawei Mate 9 and Huawei P10, and I remember that from the Huawei P9 onwards, I began to experience the Mate series and P series, using them as my main devices.
For those of us who have worked long in the media industry, being able to use a manufacturer’s smartphone as a daily main device indicates the strength of that phone, as media professionals often have high demands for product experiences.
The Kirin 960 effectively addressed some of the external doubts at the time; its evolution and upgrade are comprehensive, and it is undoubtedly positioned at the head of the industry.
2017: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence
Keywords: NPU AI, Triple Camera
In 2017, AI became a hot topic across the industry. In recent years, people have gradually recognized the importance of computing chips for artificial intelligence, and more chips dedicated to accelerating AI tasks have emerged. However, whether it is Google’s TPU behind AlphaGo or Nvidia’s Tesla V100 with the new Tensor Core architecture, these chips are designed for server-side applications. In reality, on the mobile side, SoCs for machine learning acceleration have been in the exploratory stage, and the Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 970 represents the first attempt at an AI chip on the mobile side.
If we were to summarize the Kirin 970 in one sentence, we might say: “The industry’s first true mobile AI processor.” Indeed, the Kirin 970 is such a forward-looking chip; it was officially released at the IFA in September 2017.
The first two generations of Kirin products had their strengths and weaknesses compared to competitors, but with this generation, the Kirin 970 not only inherits all the leading technologies of its predecessor but also opens up its own AI era. The Kirin 970 adopts the industry’s most advanced process, with 4 Cortex A73 cores for handling heavy loads and 4 Cortex A53 cores, also in a big.LITTLE architecture, manufactured using TSMC’s latest 10nm process. The GPU is a new generation with 12 cores of Mali-G72 MP12, with all parameters reaching flagship product levels.
In terms of communication, the Kirin 970 integrates its own baseband, supporting the highest global communication specifications of LTE Cat.18/Cat.13, achieving the industry’s highest peak download speed of 1.2Gbps.
All parameters have seen some improvement, while the most important part is the upgraded process, which allows for more transistors to fit in a given area, making it possible to add the AI module NPU.
Of course, the most eye-catching feature of the Kirin 970 is its newly designed HiAI mobile computing architecture, which for the first time integrates hardware computing acceleration capabilities for neural network models into the chip. This is also the first time that a dedicated processing unit for AI calculations has appeared in a mobile chip.
Huawei claims that the new computing architecture and computing unit can enhance the performance of machine learning tasks (compared to mobile CPUs) by dozens of times, with maximum speeds reaching 25 times that of traditional processors and 50 times the efficiency. This performance boost allows many machine learning applications that previously could not be used on mobile devices to become practical and applicable.
It is worth noting that Huawei’s addition of the AI computing module NPU to the Kirin 970 was not solely developed by itself; it was a deep collaboration with Cambricon. The two teams conducted joint development and optimization in AI computing processing, maximizing the performance of CPU/GPU/ISP/DSP/NPU through efficient and flexible heterogeneous computing, while integrating a dedicated NPU (Neural Network Processing Unit) for neural network tasks for the first time, significantly enhancing performance and efficiency compared to CPUs and GPUs.
In fact, incorporating this NPU posed numerous challenges. Adding an AI processing NPU unit to a mobile chip is not as simple as adding it to desktop and server chips; it requires consideration of the area of the SoC and the power consumption of mobile devices.
Thanks to TSMC’s 10nm process, the number of transistors in the same area (10×10 mm) has increased to 5.5 billion, making room for the AI computing unit while enhancing the chip’s computing performance within a small area.
Of course, having just the hardware module is not enough; at the application level, extensive research and testing are needed to make the NPU truly commercial, and the structure must also coordinate the collaboration between the NPU and other units within the chip, making the challenges evident.
Fortunately, Huawei HiSilicon has already made early arrangements in AI applications, opening up ports for developers to match and call the AI interfaces of the Kirin 970. Currently, the Kirin 970’s AI features such as intelligent photography, AI voice, and AI translation have already been experienced on mobile phones, and they are continuing to grow. Additionally, with its own smartphone brand advantage, Huawei’s application of AI performance will be more flexible. Huawei has taken the lead in technological innovation and industry resource integration.
In addition to AI capabilities, the ISP photography capability of the Kirin 970 is also noteworthy. The self-developed dual-camera ISP technology has been upgraded to its third generation in the Kirin 970. During the development of the Kirin 970, the entire process, including photo processing response time, focusing, motion detection, and exposure strategies, underwent in-depth optimization. The performance of the new generation ISP has significantly improved, with a throughput increase of 25%, reducing the overall photo response time by 30%, greatly shortening the time from pressing the shutter to final imaging.
We have already seen the further enhancement of its photography capabilities in the Huawei Mate 10, and in the earlier released P20 series, the first triple-camera configuration appeared, along with specially customized CMOS. With excellent photographic hardware, the chip-level algorithm processing requires the Kirin 970 team to tackle challenges and enhance performance.
According to reports, the Kirin 970 team began planning research and development for photography features three years ago, collecting extensive user feedback and conducting in-depth analysis on ISP, algorithms, and camera solutions.
With good hardware and impressive algorithms, if AI is added, it becomes an excellent combination. The introduction of AI also enables the Kirin 970 to have “intelligent vision” capabilities, allowing the camera to identify and understand scenes.
Some say the Huawei P20, from the moment you press the shutter, has completed all processes from pre-scene recognition to post-image processing. If the scene shooting plan is based on integrated algorithms, then the powerful computing capability of the NPU will allow for more integrated solutions under the same power consumption, while the NPU also possesses self-learning capabilities, optimizing algorithm operations based on accumulated data. AI will permeate all aspects of smartphone experiences.
Undoubtedly, the Kirin 970 is a significant step forward, positioning itself as a leader in mobile AI chips. Although the road of AI still has a long way to go, with many challenges ahead, the Kirin 970 will undoubtedly be a pioneer and innovator on this path.
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