Huawei’s Kirin 1020 SoC tipped to have 50% better performance than the Kirin 990

The Kirin 990 was introduced not long ago, but rumors about the next-generation chipset from Huawei started flying in. And according to people familiar with the development of the Kirin 1020, codenamed “Baltimore”, it would pose a significant upgrade over the Kirin 990 in terms of performance. Somewhere along the lines of 50% in raw speed gains.

Coming from the Kirin 980 to the Kirin 990, the latter introduced an improvement mostly in energy-efficiency and 5G connectivity but thanks to the 5nm manufacturing process and the newly-designed ARM Cortex-A78 cores, the Kirin 1020 is set to be a performance beast.

Interestingly, the Kirin 1020 is going to be the only flagship SoC that would use the Cortex-A78 architecture skipping the Cortex-A77 cores altogether. For comparison, the Kirin 990 uses Cortex-A76 cores, MediaTek’s Dimensity 1000 relies on the brand new Cortex-A77 cores as well as the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chip. So we expect the Mate 40 Pro next year to debut with the most powerful and energy-efficient SoC before the competition catches up in 2021.

Unfortunately, no more details have been given for now and we don’t expect either – the usual September announcement of Kirin SoCs is still far away.

Source (in Chinese)