Huawei is supposedly planning to announce a new processor for mobile devices in July, GizmoChina reports, citing industry sources familiar with the Chinese company’s plans. According to the same sources, the upcoming smartphone chipset will be called the HiSilicon Kirin 710 and it will be targeted at the mid-tier market.
Once the Kirin 710 materializes, it will likely compete with the Qualcomm-built Snapdragon 710, which was announced late last month as the first addition to the company’s 700-series following the initial announcement of the new processor lineup during this year’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain. Qualcomm recently revealed that the Snapdragon 700 series of processors will embrace a ‘800-series lite’ market position, which means that this family of chipsets will include the same set of features that are more commonly associated with the 800-series for smartphones that do not belong to the top-tier or flagship level, which are otherwise powered by the likes of the Snapdragon 845. As a brief recap, the Snapdragon 710 is an octa-core processor built on a 10nm process and includes two performance cores clocked at up to 2.2 GHz, along with six efficiency cores, at 1.7 GHz. The processor also boasts a 40 percent power reduction when playing 4K video, a 40 percent less power consumption when gaming, and a 20 percent power reduction when streaming video. Consequently, the main areas where the Snapdragon 710 looks to excel include artificial intelligence (AI), battery, camera, connectivity, multimedia, and performance in general.
In comparison, the Kirin 710 is said to be built based on a 12nm process at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The upcoming Kirin processor is also supposed to improve on its predecessor Kirin 659 CPU and will feature Huawei’s own chipset architecture based on the Cortex A73 CPUs. Not much is known yet about the Kirin 710, though it is rumored that the upcoming chipset will power first the upcoming Huawei Nova 3 (codenamed Paris) or the Huawei P20 Lite, which was launched in India last April along with the P20 Pro. It remains to be seen when the Kirin 710 will be added to smartphones in the future. More details about the Kirin 710 are expected to follow in the coming months.