There are many articles about Kirin 970. This article takes the boiling China people, 65.438+300 million people are good, congratulations to Huawei, the birth of a generation of magical machines as an example.
Before comparing the indicators, the author emphasizes that the content of this article has nothing to do with national pride, so the navy should be professional in launching attacks.
There is no doubt that Huawei Mate and P series mobile phones are industry leaders in industrial design, quality and innovation. But the improvement on the processor is incomparable in other aspects. Although the speed is slow, Kirin processor is the leading product in the domestic semiconductor industry, which is worthy of recognition. Most of the articles I read mainly introduced the process technology, AI, NPU, quasi-5G, Cat 18, dual ISP, HDR 10, DDR4X, UFS2. 1, and then we will simply restore some truths. Of course, these articles also mentioned Snapdragon's timidity, Samsung's gloom and MediaTek's elimination. Let's talk about this at the end.
Technology: the theory is too rash.
These articles all mentioned a data in unison. The number of transistors in Xiaolong 835 is 365,438+0 billion, Apple A 10 is 3.3 billion, and Kirin 970 is 5.5 billion, so Kirin 970 is better and more advanced. Under the process of 10nm, it is only 100 square millimeter, which is almost the size of a fingernail.
Samsung has begun to promote the second generation 10nm LPP process.
First of all, Huawei, Qualcomm and Apple do not have the ability to directly manufacture 10nm chips. At present, Samsung and TSMC have mature 10nm production lines in mainstream chip foundries, while GF and intel directly aim at 7nm process for research and development. Xiaolong 835 is the world's first mobile chip with 10nm technology, followed by Apple A 10X and MediaTek X30. Therefore, the application of 10nm is not something worth yelling about for Kirin 970. Of course, we can hope that Kirin will launch a 7nm chip.
Then, according to Moore's Law, the more transistors on a chip, the stronger the performance, which is true. But there is a key premise that this comparison is meaningful under the same framework. Although Xiaolong 835 and Kirin 970 adopt the size of ARM. Small multi-core architecture, the difference is that Xiaolong 835 developed Kyro 280 micro-architecture again after purchasing related architecture content in Qualcomm, while Kirin 970 is a pure public version. According to the known performance data, Qualcomm Kyro 280 is much better than ARM A72+A53 in performance and power consumption, so the actual performance of Xiaolong 835 is better than Kirin 970 in theory. In addition, it is worth noting that a complete SOC not only has CPU, but also various peripheral hardware such as GPU and ISP. Since it is a public CPU, the increased number of transistors naturally comes from other peripheral hardware.
It is easy to make a chip as big as a CD, but it is difficult to make it smaller than a nail. It is difficult to reduce the number of transistors as much as possible under the premise of ensuring performance and function, thus reducing the size of the chip.
AI, NPU: Is it really the first AI chip in the world?
Kirin 970 processor has a built-in peripheral hardware called NPU. All the articles I read indicate that "Kirin 970 is the world's first artificial intelligence processor with built-in neural network unit (NPU). With the support of artificial intelligence, Kirin 970 can be 25 times faster than a CPU of similar size under certain tasks, while reducing power consumption efficiency by 50 times. " Even gave such an evaluation: "It is estimated that the whole world did not expect that Huawei, a China company, was the first to come up with a mobile phone chip with an artificial intelligence processor."
Seeing this, the author is also excited, especially the last sentence. After deceiving yourself, let's analyze what Kirin NPU is. To be honest, I can't say what this NPU is until I have more detailed information. However, from the known functions, artificial intelligence, deep learning, low power consumption and high efficiency, and faster camera speed than CPU have been realized on the Xiaolong 820 processor launched in May 16, and have been continuously evolved on the subsequent 82 1, 835 and even 600 series processors.
The concept of NPU was realized as early as Xiaolong 820.
When Qualcomm Xiaolong 820 was released, it introduced something called Qualcomm Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine. It runs on Zeroth platform in Snapdragon, and its main function is to learn for mobile machines. Two supporting application scenarios are Snapdragon scene detection and Xiao Long Yun security intelligent protection. Of course, the name of this peripheral hardware is also called NPU.
Our mobile phone system comes from Google's Android. In fact, most of the current machine learning and artificial intelligence functions are derived from Goolge TensorFlow (AlphaGo, which can play Go, is its product). On the platform of Snapdragon, TensorFlow can run directly on Hexagon DSP (Xiaolong 835 is equipped with Hexagon 682 DSP). Hexagon 682 DSP is an island with low power consumption. Coincidentally, at the beginning of 17, Qualcomm said that Hexagon 682 DSP is 25 times faster than CPU in machine learning (Kirin 970 is also 25 times faster).
Xiaolong 835 or Kirin 970? Considering that the application environment such as machine learning and artificial intelligence still needs to introduce GPU for calculation, there is no comparative data between Adreno 540 and Mali-G72 at present, so it is a wild guess to say anything now.
Quasi-5G, Cat 18, UFS2. 1: As long as you are happy, you are free.
"Kirin 970 has the world's first quasi-5G network baseband, which supports LTE Cat. 18 at the highest. The transmission speed of the mobile network is at least twice that of the Qualcomm chip. " This sentence in the original text made the author almost fall off the wheelchair and stand up without crutches. What the hell is quasi-5G? Supporting 5G means supporting, and not supporting means not supporting. According to this logic, can the author be Reba's prospective husband and Trump's prospective sworn brother?
Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei, often said that it is useless for operators to support Cat, and consumers spend money in vain. However, Hess is still very good at following up LTE Cat 18 modems. Here, I want to give a compliment to Haisi's engineers first. You have worked hard. However, the author of this article should have taught himself mathematics, or he can't use a calculator. The baseband of Xiaolong 835 supports LTE X 16, which is the first scheme in the world to support downlink 1.0Gbps rate. The maximum downlink of Hisilicon 970 has reached 1.2Gbps, at least twice as much as I really don't understand. It may be that the WeChat red envelope has doubled, and the excitement is wrong. The author calculated with a calculator that it increased from 1.0Gbps to 1.2Gbps, an increase of 20%.
Qualcomm's second generation debugging demodulator X20 was released on February 22nd, 2007.
Let's talk about whether this Cat 18 is really ahead. As early as February 22nd, 20 17, Qualcomm announced the launch of Snapdragon X20 modem, with a peak download speed of 1.2Gbps, which simply means that the download speed reaches Cat 18 and the upload speed reaches Cat 13. However, it is unique in that it only needs 3~5 20MHz carrier aggregation and 4×4 MIMO antennas, and the peak download speed of 12 stream can reach1.2 Gbps. Moreover, Snapdragon X20 also supports 256-QAM modulation, so that the peak upload speed of a single data stream can reach 100Mbps. According to the author's guess, Snapdragon 945 processor will be equipped with X20 debugging demodulator. According to the historical rhythm, Snapdragon 945 should be launched in the next two months.
In addition, on August 1 day, 2065438, Samsung announced the launch of a debugging demodulator supporting 6 carrier aggregation, which will be installed in the Exynos 10 processor. The baseband can support LTE Cat. 18 at the highest, and the peak download rate can reach1.2gbps.
Objectively speaking, Kirin 970 is not the first processor in the world to support Cat 18. Compared with Snapdragon X20, no one deployed it in retail products, but X20 was released seven months earlier. How to stand up when the world is the first?
Compared with quasi-5G, Qualcomm released the Snapdragon X50 debugging demodulator in February this year, and announced that it will be commercialized in the 20 18 Korean Winter Olympics. How fast is this true 5G debugging demodulator? It can provide a download speed of 5Gbps, which is 4. 167 times higher than that of Cat 18.
As for UFS2. 1, what I want to say is that Kirin 970 is supported, but did you win the lottery today?
Written at the end: the growth of Kirin 970 is seen by the world, but don't feel like taking off.
With the continuous improvement of Huawei's mobile phone shipments in the world, the market share of Kirin processor has also increased rapidly. Compared with domestic processors such as Spreadtrum, Lian Xin and Pinecone, Hisilicon has improved the world. But does this promotion really make Snapdragon timid and Samsung dim as the author said in this article?
Let alone Qualcomm, who started as a chip maker, take Samsung, which is similar to Huawei and also a terminal brand, as a reference. The CPU and GPU of Orion processor, like Hisilicon, all come from the open design of ARM, and the baseband technology is equal to the patent. So where is the remaining gap? Is it an NPU processor? On the other hand, there is a semiconductor company named Hisilicon in China, whose products can compete with Samsung and Qualcomm. Although it is slightly inferior at present, according to the upgrade between the generations of 960 and 970, I believe that perhaps our processors in China can compete with the best international products in the industry on the Hisilicon 980.
And the arrival of this day, is by no means every day shouting that international giants are afraid to come true. I have to shout some slogans. I want to shout, "I hope all domestic mobile phones use Kirin processors, so that more than 500 million mobile phones can use Chinese cores."