Huawei Unveils Kirin 970 AI Computing Platform

[Guest]

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The CEO of Huawei, Richard Yu had announced the new Kirin 970 Soc with built in AI capabilities. The new Kirin 970 is an 8 core processor with a 12 core GPU manufacturerd by TSMC which is using the 10nm process. The chip is equipped with 4 ARM Cortex-A73 cores running at 2.4GHz and 4 ARM Cortex-A53 cores running at 1.8GHz. This new chipset is the first commercial SoC to feature the Mali-G72 2nd gen bitfrost based GPU from ARM.

 

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The chip features 5.5 billion transistors and is the first SoC to have a dedicated (NPU) or Neural Processing Unit. All of these features are implemented into a chipset that measures just 1cm2. Huawei claims that due to the diverse computing architecture, this new chip can perform AI tasks up to 25x faster to a 50x more greater effeciency than a traditional quad core Cortex-A37 alone. To demonstrate this huge performance boost, the company tested the Kirin 970 processor by making it process 2000 images per min. Huawei claims that the Kirin 970's chipset and mobile platform will be available to developers and partners globally. Huawei plans to to use the flagship processor to power its upcoming mate 10 series of phones which are said to be unveiled on October 16.

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/huawei-kirin-970-ai-soc-ifa-2017,35381.html

 

I think that this is an interesting platform, considering the size of the processor and how much processing power it packs inside of such a small size, this could bring a strong competition between the phone companies in terms of price to performance. I am also amazed that they can fit an 8 core processor in such a small form factor and still have lots of processing power at the same time.

[Sauron]

At first I thought this was a repost but then I saw it contains a lot more details about the chip.

 

I wonder what they mean exactly with "AI tasks", do all AI programs use hardware in the same way?

[VicBar]

I guess it is geared toward IoT applications.. Those AI capabilities are what is going to set apart one toaster with another toaster that remembers exactly how you like you toast, at what time of day and can recognize you from your siblings from the way you walk and your breath in the morning.

 

For real though, that sound pretty powerful and IoT can definitely benefit from such hardware. I'm not a huge fan of it but the big companies are really really into it.

[captain_to_fire]

25 minutes ago, TheBeastPC said:

I am also amazed that they can fit an 8 core processor in such a small form factor and still have lots of processing power at the same time.

8 cores on a single die? Qualcomm has been doing that for quite some time. Four high performance cores and four power efficient cores.

[Trixanity]

3 hours ago, hey_yo_ said:

8 cores on a single die? Qualcomm has been doing that for quite some time. Four high performance cores and four power efficient cores.

Well, Huawei has done that just as long. They're just following ARM's roadmap and guidelines in that regard. Next up you'll see chip designers implement ARM's DynamIQ (successor to big.LITTLE) which enables more exotic core combinations.