As you all know from my previous post on Honor 10 that it is now exclusively available for sale on Flipkart in India at a price tag of Rs. 33,000. The device specs are listed in the other article but the most interesting part of the device is its SOC Kirin 970. SOC or System On A Chip is considered to be the heart of any electronic device. High end Android smartphones normally use Qualcomm SOC’s and in Samsung’s case Exynos SOC but in case Huawei it is using their in house developed SOC known as Kirin 970.
Kirin 970 uses all the in house developed components from Huawei. It is not like Apple which uses third party Modem in its SOC. This makes Kirin 970 a little bit unique. SO what else does this piece of silicon contains? See below:
- OctaCore(8 Core) CPU with 4 cores based on ARM A73 clocked at 2.36 GHz and other 4 cores based on ARM A53 clocked at 1.84 GHz.
- ARM MALI based GPU G72MP12 clocked at 746 MHz
- Support for LP DDR4 Quad channel 16 bit memory clocked at 1833 MHz and bandwidth of 29.9 GB/s
- In house LTE Release 13 Modem with Maximum Uplink of 150 Mbps utilizing 64 QAM and with Maximum Downlink of 1200 Mbps utilizing 256 QAM which stacks well against X20 modem from Qualcomm.
- It also contains something called as an NPU. Yep another PU. This is called as Neural Processing Unit for deep learning processes such as Image/Face Recognition.
- Die Size of 96.72 mm2
- Fabrication process of 10 nm is used for fabricating this SOC at TSMC.