Huawei confident that Kirin 980 will be better than Apple's A12 Bionic processor

Apple introduced its next-generation A12 Bionic chip less than two weeks ago, and one of the company's rivals, Huawei is already contesting its performance. When Apple announced the A12 Bionic SoC (system-on-chip), it said that it's the smartest and most powerful processor to ever be included inside an iPhone and that it's the first 7nm chip to be available on the market.

Now, Huawei is pretty confident that its new Kirin 980 chipset will be better than Apple's A12 Bionic processor, said an official during a keynote held in Dubai. The Chinese handset maker has been working on the Kirin 980, its first 7nm chipset, for about three years now, focusing on three major aspects: Power and Efficiency, Intelligence, and Connectivity.

Even though both A12 Bionic and Kirin 980 chipsets include the same number of transistors – 6.9 billion, Huawei says that its processor is 75% faster than the previous generation, while the GPU should be “only” 46% faster.

When it comes to power efficiency, the Kirin 980 is 57% more efficient than Huawei's previous top-tier processor, whereas the GPU is 178% more efficient. Not to mention that Kirin 980 will be the world's first CPU to support LTE Cat.21 with peak download speeds on 1.4Gbps, Huawei claims.

It's true that Huawei compared the Kirin 980 with the previous generation of Kirin chipsets, but even so, the new SoC does seem very powerful and efficient on paper. We'll see how it fares against Apple's A12 Bionic once the Mate 20 hits the shelves.