Huawei unveils the Kirin 990 5G chipset for its future flagship phones

Huawei has a new flagship chipset called the Kirin 990. Unveiled at IFA 2019 in Berlin, Germany on Friday, the 7 nm chipset will also feature a 5G modem baked in, eight processing cores, and a maximum clock speed of 2.86 GHz.

The architecture’s pretty interesting too, with two high-clock speed cores for intensive tasks, two 2.36 GHz clock speed cores for less intense number crunching, and four 1.95 GHz cores for menial tasks.

It’s also employing a 16-core ARM-designed Mali G76 GPU coupled with its own cache.

The HUAWEI Kirin 990 5G is the industry's first and only all-in-one flagship 5G chipset. #RethinkEvolution #HuaweiIFA2019 #IFA19 pic.twitter.com/ewlQt6E0Jf

— Huawei Mobile (@HuaweiMobile) September 6, 2019

And for those who don’t want to game, a dual-core NPU is also present, for crunching voice commands and facial recognition information.

But its 5G support is the headliner. Huawei believes you can get a theoretical 2.3 Gbps download speed with this thing. In South Africa, this definitely won’t be possible any time soon.

Still, the chipset will likely make its way to Huawei’s forthcoming flagships, especially the Huawei Mate 30.

That device is set to launch in just two weeks. And it wouldn’t be far-fetched to believe the Kirin 990 will make its way into the Huawei Mate X either come November.

Feature image: Huawei’s Kirin 970 launched in 2017, by Huawei