Huawei's next-gen SoC has a neural processing unit

Huawei has just unveiled its next-gen system-on-a-chip at IFA Berlin, with the new Kirin 970 announcement teasing that the Chinese telco giant has a built-in nerual processing unit. Not bad.

The next-gen Kirin 970 is a 10nm design that sports 5.5 billion transistors, rocking an 8-core CPU and 12-core GPU combo. Huawei says that its new heterogeneous computing architecture, when compared against the Cortex-A73 (quad-core) has up to 25x more performance, and a huge 50x more efficiency. Kirin 970 is capable of processing 2000 images per second, something Huawei says is faster than all of its competitors.

CEO of Huawei's consumer business group, Richard Yu, said the new Kirin 970 is a first in a wave of new advances that will deliver AI features to our smartphones, and push them past the competition. Huawei is positioning its new Kirin 970 as an open platform for mobile AI, with the company letting developers use the neural processing capabilities of its new SoC to see where they can drive the user experience.

Huawei hasn't provided any details on the first Kirin 970-powered smartphones, so we have no ETA on a device powered by the AI-capable chipset, or price.