Why Huawei Kirin 990 Chip Does Not Use Latest Cortex-A77 Architecture?

Huawei officially released the Kirin 990 processor chip at IFA 2019 in Berlin yesterday.However, the new chip is equipped with the 2018 Cortex-A76 microarchitecture instead of the latest Cortex-A77.Recently, Huawei’s consumer business CEO Yu Chengdong provided an answer during an interview with foreign media.

After the conference, Yu Chengdong responded to foreign media’s question about “why the Kirin 990 uses the Cortex-A76 microarchitecture instead of the latest Cortex-A77” by stating that Huawei’s decision not to adopt the latest Cortex-A77 was based on considerations for device battery life.According to Yu Chengdong, the current performance of the Kirin 990 chip has already “exceeded user needs” and even if the Cortex-A77 architecture were used, it would only make the data look better.

Yu Chengdong stated that to achieve nominal speed improvements, some trade-offs need to be made in terms of energy efficiency, which would negatively impact battery life and device endurance.In other words, Huawei prefers to provide consumers with a smartphone that has better battery life rather than focusing solely on improving operating speed at the expense of battery life.

Yu Chengdong added that future Kirin chips could also use the Cortex-A77 architecture.When fully upgraded to a 5nm process, the new Kirin chip is likely to adopt the Cortex-A77 architecture.The Kirin 990, like all existing flagship chips, is built on a 7nm process.Regarding the value of using the Cortex-A77 processor, ARM previously stated that the Cortex-A77 offers approximately 20% better performance than the Cortex-A76 while maintaining the same power consumption, but Huawei found through experiments and investigations that the situation is not as ARM described.

The Kirin 990 is Huawei’s current top mobile processing chip, and the upcoming Huawei Mate 30 series smartphones are expected to be the first to feature it.It is worth noting that the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor has also been revealed, and comparisons with this processor, which also uses the A77 architecture, are inevitable in the future.