7nm Kirin 980 SoC Announced: First to Use ARM's New A76 Cores and G76 GPU

[DocSwag]

Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13298/hisilicon-announces-the-kirin-980-first-a76-g76-on-7nm

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Today we present the new Kirin 980, the first announced TSMC 7nm SoC as well as the first Cortex A76 and Mali G76 design:

HiSilicon High-End Kirin SoC Lineup
SoC	Kirin 980	Kirin 970	Kirin 960
CPU	2x A76 @ 2.60 GHz 2x A76 @ 1.92 GHz @ 512KB L2's 4x A55 @ 1.80 GHz @ 128KB L2's 4MB DSU L3	4x A73 @ 2.36 GHz 4x A53 @ 1.84 GHz 2MB L2	4x A73 @ 2.36GHz 4x A53 @ 1.84GHz 2MB L2
GPU	ARM Mali-G76MP10 @ 720 MHz	ARM Mali-G72MP12 @ 746 MHz	ARM Mali-G71MP8 @ 1037MHz
LPDDR4 Memory	4x 16-bit CH LPDDR4X @ 2133MHz 34.1GB/s	4x 16-bit CH LPDDR4X @ 1833 MHz 29.9GB/s	4x 16-bit CH LPDDR4 @ 1866MHz 29.9GB/s
Storage I/F	UFS 2.1	UFS 2.1	UFS 2.1
ISP/Camera	New Dual ISP +46% speed 10-bit pipeline	Dual 14-bit ISP	Dual 14-bit ISP (Improved)
Encode/Decode	2160p60 Decode    2160p30 Encode	2160p60 Decode 2160p30 Encode	1080p H.264 Decode & Encode 2160p30 HEVC Decode
Integrated Modem	Kirin 980 Integrated LTE (Category 21/18) DL = 1400 Mbps 4x4 MIMO 3x20MHz CA, 256-QAM (5CA no MIMO) UL = 200 Mbps 2x2 MIMO 1x20MHz CA, 256-QAM	Kirin 970 Integrated LTE (Category 18/13) DL = 1200 Mbps 5x20MHz CA, 256-QAM UL = 150 Mbps 2x20MHz CA, 64-QAM	Kirin 960 Integrated LTE (Category 12/13) DL = 600Mbps 4x20MHz CA, 64-QAM UL = 150Mbps 2x20MHz CA, 64-QAM
Sensor Hub	i8	i7	i6
NPU	Dual @ >2x perf	Yes	No
Mfc. Process	TSMC 7nm	TSMC 10nm	TSMC 16nm FFC

 

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The new Kirin 980 checks off all of the newest available IPs from Arm, finally employing a new DynamIQ CPU cluster configuration comprised of 4 Cortex A76's and 4 Cortex A55s.

 

The biggest surprise to today’s announcement for me is to see that HiSilicon has made the step forward to fully take advantage of Arm’s new DSU cluster and its asynchronous CPU configuration, and actually implement the brand new Cortex A76 into two groups, each housed in their own clock and voltage plane.

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The surprise of seeing the second pair of Cortex A76 cores running at up to 1.92GHz is actually quite fantastic news for power efficiency. Here we see HiSilicon include what is essentially a “medium” efficiency group of CPUs. Because these two cores are running on a separate clock and voltage plane to the primary performance A76 pair, it means they can operate at different efficiency points, enabling more effective power savings in varied multi-threaded operation.

 

Previously, quad-core clusters were running on the same clock and voltages, and if there was a single high performance thread requiring a high performance state, it meant that other medium-performance threads were forced to take a power efficiency penalty by needlessly running at this less efficient performance state. By introducing a mid-tier, this effectively eliminates such kind of overhead which is commonly found in real-world applications.

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In terms of performance gains, HiSilicon promises 75% gains over the Kirin 970, which after a bit of math actually ends up basically exactly where I had projected the A76 to land, based on Arm’s own performance claims.

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Moving on, the Kirin 980 is also the first SoC to employ Arm’s new generation Mali G76 GPU. The G76 greatly differs from past Midgard and Bifrost GPUs in that it vastly changes the block structure inside what you consider a “core”. Here the G76 essentially doubled up on texture units, render units, and doubles the width of the arithmetic pipelines. In effect, a G76 core is pretty much equivalent to two G72 cores.

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Now the real kicker of the new GPU, is that HiSilicon proclaims a massive 178% boost in power efficiency when compared to the Kirin 970. Putting these claims into our efficiency table and extrapolating the results:

GFXBench Manhattan 3.1 Offscreen Power Efficiency (System Active Power)
	Mfc. Process	FPS	Avg. Power (W)	Perf/W Efficiency
Kirin 980 Projection Based on +%	7FF	55 ?	3.5 ?	16 fps/W ?
Galaxy S9+ (Snapdragon 845)	10LPP	61.16	5.01	11.99 fps/W
Galaxy S9 (Exynos 9810)	10LPP	46.04	4.08	11.28 fps/W
Galaxy S8 (Snapdragon 835)	10LPE	38.90	3.79	10.26 fps/W
LeEco Le Pro3 (Snapdragon 821)	14LPP	33.04	4.18	7.90 fps/W
Galaxy S7 (Snapdragon 820)	14LPP	30.98	3.98	7.78 fps/W
Huawei Mate 10 (Kirin 970)	10FF	37.66	6.33	5.94 fps/W
Galaxy S8 (Exynos 8895)	10LPE	42.49	7.35	5.78 fps/W
Galaxy S7 (Exynos 8890)	14LPP	29.41	5.95	4.94 fps/W
Meizu PRO 5 (Exynos 7420)	14LPE	14.45	3.47	4.16 fps/W
Nexus 6P (Snapdragon 810 v2.1)	20Soc	21.94	5.44	4.03 fps/W
Huawei Mate 8 (Kirin 950)	16FF+	10.37	2.75	3.77 fps/W
Huawei Mate 9 (Kirin 960)	16FFC	32.49	8.63	3.77 fps/W
Huawei P9 (Kirin 955)	16FF+	10.59	2.98	3.55 fps/W

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The new chipset boasts 6.9bn transistors – an increase of 25% compared to last year’s Kirin 970 coming in at 5.5bn. HiSilicon was able to maintain a small die area of less than 100mm² thanks to the new 7nm TSMC process node.

It looks like Huawei beat Qualcomm to the punch here, with them getting to use 7nm and the new A76 cores most likely a full half year before Qualcomm. And it looks quite promising: Single core performance is comparable to the A10 Fusion, and GPU performance seems to be close to the SD845 while using much less power.

 

One of the things that really caught my eye though was the transistor density. The Kirin 980 packs 6.9 billion transistors into less than 100 mm^2. For reference, GP104, fabbed on TSMC 16nm, has an over 3 times larger die size. This could mean a lot for 7nm Nvidia and AMD GPUs, as well as 7nm Zen2. We could, theoretically, have the massive 750 mm^2+ 18.6 billion transistor GPU of the 2080 ti only be around 300 mm^2 on 7nm, not to mention efficiency and clock speed improvements.

[WMGroomAK]

It should be interesting to see the performance of these chips once they launch in October...  Would especially like to see how accurate the new GPS chip is since it'll support the L5 bands.  Also find the WiFi throughput speeds (1.7 Gbps) to be fairly impressive if they hold out.

[bimmerman]

If it gets better battery life in everyday tasks, I'm sold. I just want solid battery life with good performance in email/messaging/browsing/youtube.

[Brooksie359]

Just now, bimmerman said:

If it gets better battery life in everyday tasks, I'm sold. I just want solid battery life with good performance in email/messaging/browsing/youtube.

Honestly I think performance has been more than sufficient for what I need for a while now. Now I just want more battery life tbh. 

[bimmerman]

Just now, Brooksie359 said:

Honestly I think performance has been more than sufficient for what I need for a while now. Now I just want more battery life tbh. 

Yep, agreed. Performance degradation over time is the real killer. Battery is key.

 

If I played games on my phone or multitasked like crazy then I might have a different opinion.

[Brooksie359]

Just now, bimmerman said:

Yep, agreed. Performance degradation over time is the real killer. Battery is key.

 

If I played games on my phone or multitasked like crazy then I might have a different opinion.

Yeah when you have a high end desktop the appeal of mobile games just isn't there at least for me. Even gaming on my laptop feels slightly bad because it just feels like a lesser version of what I could be playing. 

[WMGroomAK]

6 minutes ago, bimmerman said:

If it gets better battery life in everyday tasks, I'm sold. I just want solid battery life with good performance in email/messaging/browsing/youtube.

Well, it should get about 32% better power efficiency on the CPU side and about 178% better GPU power efficiency over their last chip (at least if you trust their slides)...  I would hope that would and an hour or two to the battery life during the day.

[bimmerman]

1 minute ago, WMGroomAK said:

Well, it should get about 32% better power efficiency on the CPU side and about 178% better GPU power efficiency over their last chip (at least if you trust their slides)...  I would hope that would and an hour or two to the battery life during the day.

Yep, that's pretty solid.

 

If the GPU is that much more efficient, I bet using maps and youtube is going to drain a whole lot less battery.

[yian88]

1 hour ago, Brooksie359 said:

Honestly I think performance has been more than sufficient for what I need for a while now. Now I just want more battery life tbh. 

Nothing will help you with battery life better than a power bank, ofcourse SoC improvements are welcome but battery tech just sucks.

Anyway this 7nm Kirin CPU will be extremely expensive and huawei only hence i dont give a fuck a bout it i dont buy garbage huawei products.

 

On the other hand Snapdragon 845/710 and future chips will be available for many device manufacturers, im hoping for more midrange phones with S845 like Xiaomi POCOF1

 

[Brooksie359]

6 minutes ago, yian88 said:

Nothing will help you with battery life better than a power bank, ofcourse SoC improvements are welcome but battery tech just sucks.

Anyway this 7nm Kirin CPU will be extremely expensive and huawei only hence i dont give a fuck a bout it i dont buy garbage huawei products.

 

On the other hand Snapdragon 845/710 and future chips will be available for many device manufacturers, im hoping for more midrange phones with S845 like Xiaomi POCOF1

 

if the cpu and gpu use less power then it would improve battery life... 

I dont want to carry around a battery bank as it would defeat the reason why I want better battery life.

[Coaxialgamer]

25 minutes ago, Tedny said:

Looks like "glued together" few old cores 

Those are ARM's state-of-the-art processor cores and GPU...

[Drak3]

4 minutes ago, Coaxialgamer said:

Those are ARM's state of the art processor cores and GPU...

And that art would be cave drawings 

 

/s

[Doobeedoo]

Very nice. 

Interesting approach with big.middle.little cluster config though. So software wise it wasn't much of a performance difference if it was 4 performance cores rather than than 2 performance and 2 mid performance cores. But extra efficiency from this is more worth it I guess. 

 

[DocSwag]

8 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

Very nice. 

Interesting approach with big.middle.little cluster config though. So software wise it wasn't much of a performance difference if it was 4 performance cores rather than than 2 performance and 2 mid performance cores. But extra efficiency from this is more worth it I guess. 

 

Yeah, that's my understanding, especially as single core performance matters much more than multi core performance most of the time for phones.

[Drak3]

Meh, I'll wait for the Kirin 980Ti.

 

 

 

kappa

[JoeCoke]

On 8/31/2018 at 1:12 PM, Brooksie359 said:

Honestly I think performance has been more than sufficient for what I need for a while now. Now I just want more battery life tbh. 

Definitely, battery is all I care about now really. I struggle to find a single reason to have more performance in a phone for the tasks we do on them currently. Even my old s5 does everything at a reasonable speed.