Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 1020 To Be 50% More Powerful Than Kirin 990

The upcoming flagship smartphones from Huawei -- the P40 and the P40 Pro are likely to be based on the Kirin 990 SoC. There are already talks about the successor to the current Kirin flagship processor -- the Kirin 1020 that is likely to debut in the second half of 2020, probably with the Huawei Mate 40 series of smartphones.

According to the recent developments, the HiSilicon Kirin 1020 codenamed "Baltimore" is expected to offer up to 50 percent more performance compared to the Kirin 990. This is also the first processor from the company that will be manufactured using 5nm fabrication, which makes it much more efficient compared to Huawei's present offering.

As the chipset will be based on 5nm fabrication, the brand will be able to tuck in more number of transistors inside the chipset without increasing the overall form factor. In fact, the Kirin 990 5G is one of the densest chipsets that houses more than 10 billion transistors. The Kirin 1020 is also expected to come with a built-in next-generation Balong 5G modem.

Leaks suggest that the high-performance cores on the Kirin 1020 will be based on ARM Cortex-A78 cores, giving it leverage over the Snapdragon 865 and the MediaTek Dimensity 1000, which uses ARM Cortex-A77 cores. Besides the improvement in CPU performance, the Kirin 1020 is likely to come with a next-generation Mali GPU and a next-generation AI processing unit.

At the time of launch, the Huawei Mate 40 and the Mate 40 Pro are expected to be the most powerful Android smartphones, compared to the competition. Qualcomm can only play a catch-up game with Huawei by late 2020. Most of the Android flagship smartphones of 2020 will be based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SoC. Brands like Samsung, Huawei will use their own chipsets.

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