Huawei Mate 20, the first Kirin 980 device, to be unveiled on October 16

But Brody reiterates the Kirin 980 is superior, primarily because everything on it is created by Huawei in-house.

So, how is the Kirin 980 different from other processors in the market?

The Kirin 980 claims many other firsts to its credit. It is also the world’s first cortex-A76 architecture chipset, dual NPU design and first chipset to support LTE Cat.21. Brody says the benefit for consumers is clear.

“It can improve speeds by up to 20 per cent and power efficiency by 40 per cent,” he explains. While the Kirin 920 announced in 2014 had 2 billion transistors, the Kirin 980 has 6.9 billion transistors, he elaborates. Since this is the first cortex-A76 based processor, Brody said, compared to last year’s Kirin 970 the average single-core performance jump was 75 per cent while power efficiency has improved 58 per cent.

Key features of the Kirin 980 processor.

In comparison to the 10nm Qualcomm Snapdragon 845, which Huawei uses extensively for comparisons, the Kirin 980 was at least 30 per cent efficient on both counts, he claimed.

The Kirin 980 achieves a lot of its power efficiency through flexible scheduling on the platform. So when the phone just needs to play music, it will activate just one of the small cores, while for social it might be a mix of small and mids, and for a game like PUBG will end up using all the cores, the Huawei product manager explained.

Also, the world’s first commercial use of the Mali G76 GPU, gives the Kirin 980 more power and performance efficiencies, especially with its use of AI-powered predictions.

This will be the first implementation of a dual ISP (image signal processor), which means consumers can look forward to way better camera performance, an area in which Huawei is already pushing the envelope with its triple camera smartphone, the P20 Pro. In fact, the Kirin 980 will makes phones powerful enough to recognise multiple subjects in video in real time, but just a face of a flower in a still photo. On photos, the processor will, for instance, be able to recognise 500 photos in just six seconds.

Then with Kirin 980, Huawei will start testing 4.5G networks in some parts of the world, including India. Huawei is promising that the better, faster, modem on the Kirin 980 will for instance work much better in Metro and high speed rail networks.

But will the Kirin 980 be limited to flagships alone?

Brody says the there will be mid-range devices too that are powered by Kirin 980. However, the company was noncommittal on when we could see this processor in devices under the Honor branding, which are quite popular in India.