Hands on with Huawei’s Kirin 980 processor: An engineering masterpiece

We all take it for granted, we use them every day, we put them to their limits every hour, yet we don’t even know what they look like or how amazing they are.

I’m talking about computer processors.  The brains of any computing device, and most amazingly, the smartphones we carry around with us today.

Today I took a look at something that I’ve never seen before – a smartphone processor.  More specifically a “System on a Chip” – or SoC as they are known.

This tiny little thing, 1cm square in size, has 6.9 billion transistors on it – yep, you read that right.

It’s the Huawei Kirin 980 and it’s the result of a collaboration between Huawei and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacture Company, creating the world’s smallest processor at 7nm.

These things don’t happen easy either – it took 20,000 engineering prototypes and over 100 iterations to get it right and up to the high standards demanded of today’s devices.

And this processor is not just the power of the device, it’s almost everything.  the WiFi, Bluetooth, Cellular connection, Graphics and it packs all the Artificial Intelligence required to allow a camera to recognise 4500 objects in a minute.

Better speeds, better performance, longer battery life, decreased degradation of performance over time are but a few of the benefits of such a chip.

And this is just a tease.  The chip isn’t in any phone available today – instead, it’s in Huawei’s “next big thing” – to be revealed in London on October 16, their next flagship phone – likely to be the Mate 20.  Stand by for that one!