Huawei is about to launch the Kirin 985, a new SoC that aims to stay somewhat below the powerful Kirin 990.
The company just introduced the Huawei P40 with the Kirin 990 SoC with 5G, and now looks for a somewhat inferior solution for upcoming smartphones. According to the latest leak, the Kirin 985 will be on the upcoming Honor 30, which will also have 5G connectivity.
From the result of a benchmark, this new SoC has appeared with a configuration similar to the old Kirin 820, which has a prime core, three high-performance and four energy efficient cores. Compared to the powerful Kirin 990, the latter maintains two prime cores, two high-performance and four energy efficient cores.
The Kirin 985 SoC has a dual-core Neural Processing Unit (NPU), so tasks related to artificial intelligence (AI) will benefit greatly from the Kirin 820, which was single-core. Although the manufacturing process Huawei has followed is not known, it is expected to continue as the Kirin 990 line which has a 7nm production and EVU node.
The bad part of the leak is that this benchmark does not make use of the GPU, so we don’t know about the graphics performance of the upcoming Kirin 985 SoC. On the other hand, it can be seen that the Kirin 985 is below the MediaTek Dimensity 1000, although MediaTek seems that it is not playing completely clean as far as benchmarks are concerned.
The Honor 30 series is expected to be launched on April 15.
