Huawei, through its subsidiary HiSilicon, will be making in-roads to give mid-tier smartphones an AI boost. The supposed upcoming Kirin 670 is said to feature Huawei’s Neural Processing Unit, which could be the same NPU that handles AI in the higher-end Kirin 970.
An NPU is meant to help smartphones be more efficient when runing AI computations. Most of which comes from the benefit of offloading the workload to a separate, purposed-designed chip; instead of putting the task on the main processor. It also helps other privacy concerns by reducing the need to use the cloud for processing.
Apart from the NPU, the Kirin 670 is slated to be a hexa-core SoC, with two Cortex-A72 cores and four Cortex A-53 cores. It’s also said to have the ARM Mali G72 MP4 GPU from Kirin 970; which powers phones such as the Huawei Mate 10 and Honor V10. The Kirin 670 will be built on the 12nm FinFET construction method.
The existence of an NPU on the Kirin 670 is still unconfirmed, as the source isn’t directly from Huawei. That said, it wouldn’t be too difficult to imagine that something like this would be in the works. It may just be that we see it later rather than sooner.
(Source: MyDrivers via XDA Developers)
