Huawei unveils faster phone chip it says can beat Apple, Samsung

[Kilage]

Quote

Huawei [HWT.UL] aims to use artificial intelligence-powered features such as instant image recognition to take on rivals Samsung and Apple when it launches its new flagship phone next month

Huawei seems to really want to get to the top with this move. If the articles sources can be trusted, this will (hopefully) make the big boys sweat a little bit.

 

Quote

The company asserts its newly announced Kirin 970 chip will preserve battery life on phones by up to 50 percent.

Up to 50% but I wonder what the average preservation rate will be. Also, Does this mean they will try to get away with extremely small batteries to create smaller, lighter phones? Or will they be making a nice big phone with a long battery life? 

 

Quote

Huawei describes the new chip as the first Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for smartphones. It brings together classic computing, graphics, image and digital signal processing power that have typically required separate chips, taking up more space and slowing interaction between features within phones.

Makes me wonder how this will effect the thermals of the phone with all the processing power in one area. Maybe Linus can build a DIY heat sink for them?

 

Full article: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-huawei-tech-smartphone/huawei-unveils-faster-phone-chip-it-says-can-beat-apple-samsung-idUSKCN1BD0SI?il=0

 

New to forum, pls no h8 m8

Edited September 3, 2017 by iamdarkyoshi
Fixed quotes for night theme users

[Shiv78]

4 minutes ago, Dale B said:

New to forum, pls no h8 m8

*joined April 2014*

 

lol jk though not many posts

[Kilage]

Just now, Shiv78 said:

*joined April 2014*

 

lol jk though not many posts

Haha, I probably should have said "subforum"

[Castdeath97]

No words on the graphics Huawei? You usually screw that up.....

[DocSwag]

2 minutes ago, Castdeath97 said:

No words on the graphics Huawei? You usually screw that up.....

They're using the G72 from ARM. On the 960 they used the G71 and I think there were some power consumption issues with it. This is on 10nm though so maybe it won't be that bad.

[dizmo]

You missed some of the most interesting things about the chip; the dual ISPs that should greatly improve image processing (they've shown comparisons between the S8), and the 4.5G CAT.18 modem. There's also the fact that the NPU can process 2005 images per minute whereas the CPU alone could only do 97. It's about 3x as powerful as the GPU in TFlops. 

 

As for your info, the CPU as a whole isn't that efficient, they were referring to the NPU. 

 

It'll be interesting to see how it performs. Huawei could hit it out of the park with the Mate 10 this year. 

 

15 minutes ago, Castdeath97 said:

No words on the graphics Huawei? You usually screw that up.....

The Kirin CPUs usually aren't that bad. Better than the Exynos in a lot of ways. 

13 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

They're using the G72 from ARM. On the 960 they used the G71 and I think there were some power consumption issues with it. This is on 10nm though so maybe it won't be that bad.

Was it really that bad? Phones with the 960 generally got excellent battery life. 

[Castdeath97]

Just now, dizmo said:

You missed some of the most interesting things about the chip; the dual ISPs that should greatly improve image processing (they've shown comparisons between the S8), and the 4.5G CAT.18 modem. There's also the fact that the NPU can process 2005 images per minute whereas the CPU alone could only do 97. It's about 3x as powerful as the GPU in TFlops. 

 

As for your info, the CPU as a whole isn't that efficient, they were referring to the NPU. 

 

It'll be interesting to see how it performs. Huawei could hit it out of the park with the Mate 10 this year. 

 

The Kirin CPUs usually aren't that bad. Better than the Exynos in a lot of ways. 

Was it really that bad? Phones with the 960 generally got excellent battery life. 

I recall that the GSM arena reviews used to complain about the GPU.

[DocSwag]

12 minutes ago, dizmo said:

Was it really that bad? Phones with the 960 generally got excellent battery life. 

That's because normal day to day tasks don't stress the gpu much.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11088/hisilicon-kirin-960-performance-and-power/5

8.6 watts of power, that's worse than the 810.

 

If you look at fps/watt the g71 is below even the 810. The adreno 530 in the 820/821 is around double the fps/watt. The 835 isn't even in these tests, we can imagine it would be even better.

 

To be fair though, this may be because huawei clocked the g71 really high (over 1 ghz)

[Sauron]

This doesn't seem to be about the chip being faster or more powerful than the competition in general, just in specific tasks which make use of new technology.

 

Lower power consumption is cool, I hope they don't take that as an excuse to make the phone thinner and cut away even more battery.

[captain_to_fire]

1 hour ago, Dale B said:

Makes me wonder how this will effect the thermals of the phone with all the processing power in one area. Maybe Linus can build a DIY heat sink for them?

He watercooled a bunch of phones. Back when the Snapdragon 810 is a small flat iron that Samsung ditched it in favor of their Exynos 7420 and the LG G4 used Snapdragon 808 which is better in thermals. 

 

[Sniperfox47]

Yeah, I don't see how this chip is even going to beat a Snapdragon 835, much less Apple's chips. Apple's hurricane and zephyr cores beat any other ARMv8 cores hands down by quite the large margin. And unless their GPU is worse than PowerVR's (which is a very real possibility to be fair), the 7xT they used in their A10 SoC was already incredibly powerful.

 

Other than for processing neural nets on device -something that other chip makers are focused on  a now too-, I don't see what's so special about this SoC...

[captain_to_fire]

1 hour ago, Dale B said:

Huawei describes the new chip as the first Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for smartphones. It brings together classic computing, graphics, image and digital signal processing power that have typically required separate chips, taking up more space and slowing interaction between features within phones.

Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't those already in a single chip that's why it's called System-on-Chip (SoC) where the CPU, GPU, ISP, motion-coprocessor, security/encryption coprocessor are in a single die? 

[Zodiark1593]

1 hour ago, dizmo said:

You missed some of the most interesting things about the chip; the dual ISPs that should greatly improve image processing (they've shown comparisons between the S8), and the 4.5G CAT.18 modem. There's also the fact that the NPU can process 2005 images per minute whereas the CPU alone could only do 97. It's about 3x as powerful as the GPU in TFlops. 

 

As for your info, the CPU as a whole isn't that efficient, they were referring to the NPU. 

 

It'll be interesting to see how it performs. Huawei could hit it out of the park with the Mate 10 this year. 

 

The Kirin CPUs usually aren't that bad. Better than the Exynos in a lot of ways. 

Was it really that bad? Phones with the 960 generally got excellent battery life. 

The GPU in the 960 had a maximum clock speed in excess of 1 GHz. It was able to match or beat the Adreno 530 in benchmarks, through at a heavy cost to power consumption and heat. I'd imagine that it won't see top speed in anything but benchmarks.

[dizmo]

2 hours ago, Castdeath97 said:

I recall that the GSM arena reviews used to complain about the GPU.

Their reviews generally complain about anything that isn't on par with the absolute top tier.

1 hour ago, DocSwag said:

That's because normal day to day tasks don't stress the gpu much.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11088/hisilicon-kirin-960-performance-and-power/5

8.6 watts of power, that's worse than the 810.

 

If you look at fps/watt the g71 is below even the 810. The adreno 530 in the 820/821 is around double the fps/watt. The 835 isn't even in these tests, we can imagine it would be even better.

 

To be fair though, this may be because huawei clocked the g71 really high (over 1 ghz)

Ah, well hopefully they're remedied that with this one...though to be perfectly honest I don't really do graphically intense things on my phone so I couldn't care less about the GPU.

1 hour ago, Sauron said:

This doesn't seem to be about the chip being faster or more powerful than the competition in general, just in specific tasks which make use of new technology.

 

Lower power consumption is cool, I hope they don't take that as an excuse to make the phone thinner and cut away even more battery.

Huawei's always been pretty good with their batteries. I wouldn't be surprised if we see an increase in capacity with the Mate 10, or at the very least on par with the 4000mah of the previous generation.

1 hour ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Yeah, I don't see how this chip is even going to beat a Snapdragon 835, much less Apple's chips. Apple's hurricane and zephyr cores beat any other ARMv8 cores hands down by quite the large margin. And unless their GPU is worse than PowerVR's (which is a very real possibility to be fair), the 7xT they used in their A10 SoC was already incredibly powerful.

 

Other than for processing neural nets on device -something that other chip makers are focused on  a now too-, I don't see what's so special about this SoC...

In benchmarks, no, but in day to day use the Kirin chip is actually pretty solid.

One could easily say the same thing about the SD835, or any other incremental improvement for a chip.

I'm very interested to see what the NPU does in day to day use.

1 hour ago, hey_yo_ said:

Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't those already in a single chip that's why it's called System-on-Chip (SoC) where the CPU, GPU, ISP, motion-coprocessor, security/encryption coprocessor are in a single die? 

The things you listed, yes, but the NPU, probably not.

[Agosto]

More info here

http://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-announces-kirin-970-797788/

No A75 nor A55. Quite boring.

[OmJo93]

4 hours ago, Dale B said:

Up to 50% but I wonder what the average preservation rate will be. Also, Does this mean they will try to get away with extremely small batteries to create smaller, lighter phones? Or will they be making a nice big phone with a long battery life? 

This is how OEMs respond to every new generation of Snapdragon processor... Qualcomm advertises it as being more battery efficient than the previous generation and smartphone manufacturers basically go "lol well then here's a smaller battery so you don't actually get any real benefit from that new battery efficiency". I doubt Huawei won't go that direction themselves.

 

Smartphones are thin enough, there's no reason to make them thinner other than a lack of real innovation in the smartphone industry. But that's what the vast majority of consumers really care about so...

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Yay new phone that's slightly faster than the competition... *yawn*

[Zodiark1593]

1 hour ago, OmJo93 said:

This is how OEMs respond to every new generation of Snapdragon processor... Qualcomm advertises it as being more battery efficient than the previous generation and smartphone manufacturers basically go "lol well then here's a smaller battery so you don't actually get any real benefit from that new battery efficiency". I doubt Huawei won't go that direction themselves.

 

Smartphones are thin enough, there's no reason to make them thinner other than a lack of real innovation in the smartphone industry. But that's what the vast majority of consumers really care about so...

*as I sit here, reading this on a phone with both an SD821 and a >4k mAh battery*

[Misanthrope]

Here's the list of things you can actually do with the speed:

 

1) Increase the resolution past the point where most humans can, at glance, tell the difference in DPI

2) ...

3) ...

4) ...

 

I'm being told that we'll have to come back to this list.

[Zodiark1593]

7 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Here's the list of things you can actually do with the speed:

 

1) Increase the resolution past the point where most humans can, at glance, tell the difference in DPI

2) ...

3) ...

4) ...

 

I'm being told that we'll have to come back to this list.

Even at 4K, rendering the UI doesn't tend to require a lot of GPU power.

 

Though I could see where a GPU like the one in the Kirin 960 could be a good choice. A small, very high clocked GPU to render the high resolution display when interacted with. Sustained performance suffers, which given the games market, may be only a minor point. The gains in die space can be put to use elsewhere as well.

 

I would like to see 120hz smartphone displays become a thing, especially before 4K. With self panel refresh, the additional power consumption should be moot, unless someone is literally just swiping back and forth for hours on end with no pause.

[Guest]

If they are even able to reach 70% of the A11 single core performance it would be impressive, but if not i dont see how its going to make them shed some tears .

 

The features sound cool, but Huawei usually doesnt sell the best phones internationally anyways (remember the last flagship?).

 

Mate 9 for Global, Mate 9 Pro for China. Wanted a Pro model as an international phone? Pay 1400€ for some Porsche design flare.

[OmJo93]

1 hour ago, Zodiark1593 said:

*as I sit here, reading this on a phone with both an SD821 and a >4k mAh battery*

Which phone is that? I think my point still stands when 99% (yes I made this number up, but you know what I mean) of flagships released this year and last had batteries under 3500 mAh. Many even shrunk the batteries in their 2017 flagships (OnePlus, Motorola, Samsung (for obvious reasons wrt the Note 8), Sony just off the top of my head)

[Zodiark1593]

47 minutes ago, OmJo93 said:

Which phone is that? I think my point still stands when 99% (yes I made this number up, but you know what I mean) of flagships released this year and last had batteries under 3500 mAh. Many even shrunk the batteries in their 2017 flagships (OnePlus, Motorola, Samsung (for obvious reasons wrt the Note 8), Sony just off the top of my head)

My LeEco Le Pro 3. Bought it for $250.

 

I wouldn't recommend it for most people as rooting or flashing a ROM are practically required for a good software experience (running LineageOS on mine). XDA seems to love these things though.