Speaking at Europe’s biggest tech show in Berlin this week, Huawei CEO Richard Yu announced the company’s new Kirin 970 SoC (system on a chip) with built in AI capabilities, according to a press release on the company’s website:
Built using a 10nm advanced process, the chipset packs 5.5 billion transistors into an area of only one cm². HUAWEI’s new flagship Kirin 970 is HUAWEI’s first mobile AI computing platform featuring a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Compared to a quad-core Cortex-A73 CPU cluster, the Kirin 970’s new heterogeneous computing architecture delivers up to 25x the performance with 50x greater efficiency. Simply put, the Kirin 970 can perform the same AI computing tasks faster and with far less power. In a benchmark image recognition test, the Kirin 970 processed 2,000 images per minute, which was faster than other chips on the market.
“As we look to the future of smartphones, we’re at the threshold of an exciting new era. Mobile AI = On-Device AI + Cloud AI,” Yu said. “The Kirin 970 is the first in a series of new advances that will bring powerful AI features to our devices and take them beyond the competition.”