Huawei has, in recent years, become a much bigger threat to Samsung and Apple"s dominance of the smartphone industry than expected. It even surpassed Apple to become the second largest smartphone maker last year and, according to some estimates, may one-up Samsung to take the number one spot.
The Chinese manufacturer isn"t stopping just there, though. In a recent briefing in Dubai, the company showed it also wants the bragging rights for having the fastest mobile processor, claiming its Kirin 980, announced late last month, will be faster than Apple"s homebrewed A12 Bionic, the chip powering the latest crop of iPhones.
Now, unlike the iPhone XS, the Kirin 980 is still not available for testing in any commercially available product on the market. For that, we"ll need to wait until Huawei"s launch event on October 16, when it will officially reveal the Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro, its first phones to ship with the Kirin 980.
The company claims its processor is 75% faster than the Kirin 970, has a 46% faster GPU and is up to 178% more power efficient in certain workloads. It"s also supposed to be the world"s first processor to support LTE Cat 21.
However, despite all of its impressive gains over the last generation, it"s hard to imagine the Kirin 980 beating out Apple"s latest in term of raw performance, especially single core scores, given that this is an area where Apple has maintained a healthy advantage over its Android competitors for years now. Both chips pack 6.9 billion transistors and are also claiming to be the first 7nm SoC, but Apple has traditionally maintained an advantage by making use of entirely custom cores and packing in a healthy amount of cache to gain an edge in performance.
Without further explanation by Huawei on exactly how its processor is better than Apple"s, all we can do for now is wait for official benchmark scores of the Mate 20 powered by the Kirin 980 and compare those to the performance of the newest iPhones.
Source: TechRadar