How building their own chips is helping Huawei close in on Apple

Kirin 980 CPU expected to debut in the Huawei Mate 20

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Huawei introduced the Kirin 980 chipset in August at the IFA trade show in Berlin. (Picture: Huawei)

Published: 7:37pm, 4 Oct 2018Updated: 8:41am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

They’re the unseen heart of a smartphone, but not something talked about as often as say, the screen, or the battery. But at a time when smartphones are more similar than they’ve ever been, Huawei’s efforts to build its own CPUs might be starting to pay off.

In a research note published this week, reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says the gap in user experience between Huawei’s handsets and Apple’s iPhones is narrowing, thanks to the Chinese giant’s latest Kirin 980 processor.

Unveiled in August, it was said to be the world’s first 7-nanometer chipset… but it wasn’t the first to actually see release, since Apple’s A12 Bionic beat Huawei to market when it appeared in the iPhone XS. The Kirin 980 is expected to ship with the Mate 20 smartphone that Huawei is unveiling this month.

Producing in-house chips is both impressive and important. Few Android handset makers do; Samsung does, but not all of their flagship smartphones carry their own Exynos CPUs.

Many attribute Apple’s success, in part, to their ability to design custom silicon for their devices. It allowed them to tailor their chips to suit the needs of their devices, as well as adding any features that Apple feels they might need -- like the M series of motion co-processors that allow the iPhone to count your steps without powering up the whole device, or the W chips that allow AirPods to pair faster with other Apple devices.

And best of all for Apple: All of those improvements are for their benefit alone.