Huawei to unveil new smartphone with AI-powered chipset ‘Kirin 970’

The Chinese technology giant Huawei has officially unleashed its next generation mobile chip unprecedentedly powered by built-in artificial intelligence (AI) computing capabilities. The chip will be embedded in its new flagship smartphone model the Mate 10, due to be released in October.

Kirin 970, the latest mobile chip designed by Huawei, features a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that is able to process AI tasks right on the phones as compared with the commonly seen AI features normally dependent on the cloud.

During the launch event of Kirin 970 in Berlin, Germany on Saturday, Yu Chengdong, Huawei’s consumer business segment chief, said the mobile AI technology shall be a combination of both the cloud AI and the in-device AI as the latter solves the latency, stability, and privacy issues of cloud AI.

“The ultimate goal [for Huawei] is to provide a significantly better user experience, and 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,” said Yu.

Devices powered by the Kirin 970 will be able to truly know and understand their users, while supporting real-time image recognition, voice interaction, and intelligent photography with ease, as the 10-nanometre mobile processor owns an 8-core CPU and 12-core graphics processor, delivering up to 25 times the performance with 50 times greater efficiency in comparison to a quad-core Cortex-A73 CPU cluster.