Huawei says its new smartphone chip is faster than Snapdragon in almost every way

Over the years, we've gotten used to two smartphone SoCs (system-on-a-chip) battling for dominance: Apple's A series of chips and Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8xx series. 

But Huawei's new smartphone chip, the Kirin 980, is poised to usurp that duopoly. 

At its press conference ahead of the IFA trade show in Berlin, Huawei unveiled all the details of the new chip that will power its next flagship smartphones (the first in line will be the Huawei Mate 20, which is likely to launch in October). 

The presentation started with a list of world firsts for the Kirin 980, and it was a pretty long list. It's the first smartphone chip built with a 7-nanometer process and the first to feature ARM's Cortex-A76 CPU as well as its new Mali-G76 GPU. It's the first SoC to support the ultra-fast 2,133Mhz LPDDR4X memory, and the first with an integrated 1.4Gbps Cat.21 modem, too.  Read more...