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Huawei announces the Kirin 990 chipset for the Mate 30 series, with 5G and more

As the company tends to do, Huawei announced the HiSilicon Kirin 990 today. There are 4G and 5G models of the new chipset, which will be used in the company's premium smartphones over the next year.

The firm says that the 5G model can support both non-standalone and standalone architectures, along with TDD/FDD full frequency bands. The chipset offers downlink speeds of up to 2.3Gbps, with uplink speeds of up to 1.25Gbps.

Huawei is bringing big.LITTLE cores to its Neural Processing Unit (NPU) using the Da Vinci architecture. It's still a dual-core NPU, but there's a large core for heavier tasks and a more efficient core for less power consumption.

As was the case with the Kirin 980, the Kirin 990 has three levels of power consumption, with two 'ultra-large' cores at 2.86GHz, two large cores, and four small cores. The chipset also includes a 16-core Mali-G76 GPU. Huawei also touted gaming performance, with Kirin Gaming+ 2.0 on the 5G model.

Just as you'd expect, the ISP is updated as well with things like block-matching and 3D filtering for better noise-reduction. And as we reported on, it will support 4K 60fps video capture.

Interestingly, the difference between the Kirin 990 and Kirin 990 (5G) isn't just a 5G modem. The 5G version seems to be superior in a number of ways, although Huawei didn't release detailed spec sheets. You can expect to see the new chipsets first in the Mate 30 series this month, and then in various other premium handsets over the next year.

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