Huawei Unveils AI Mobile Chipset Said To Rival A11 Processor In Upcoming iPhones

On Saturday, Chinese mobile maker Huawei unveiled its first artificial intelligence smartphone chipset, which it hopes will lure customers away from Apple's upcoming range of new iPhones and towards the Asian company's "most powerful handset yet," the Mate 10, which is set to debut next month. Mac Rumors reports: Huawei touted the Kirin 970 AI mobile chipset's built-in "neural processing unit" at the IFA consumer electronics trade show in Berlin, claiming that the technology is "20 times faster" than a traditional processor. The world's third largest smartphone maker claimed that mobile devices powered by the Kirin 970 will be able to "truly know and understand their users," by supporting real-time image recognition, voice interaction, and intelligent photography with ease. According to Nikkei, the Kirin 970 integrates 5.5 billion transistors in a single square centimeter about the size of a thumbnail, which includes an octa-core central processing unit, a 12-core graphics processing unit, a dual-image signal processor, a high-speed 1.2Gbps Cat.18 modem, and AI mobile computing architecture. The Kirin 970 is said to be based on the same 10-nanometer technology as Apple's existing A10X Fusion processor and the A11 processor that will power its new iPhone range, set to debut this month. The Mate 10 is said to be a bezel-less all-screen handset with a 6-inch, 2:1 display and a 2,160 x 1,080 resolution. Like Apple's so-called "iPhone 8," the Mate 10 is also expected to feature some form of facial recognition and improved cameras.

Re:

[thereitis]

I think so, too. Once you've done all this processing on the phone and identified people, places, things, ... all that needs to be transferred to the mothership is the metadata.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather have the chinese spy on me than my own government.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

So we should be using Atom devices because they are 'armless?

Re:

[ewibble]

I never thought about that but you are probably right. I say or do nothing of any national significance but the likely hood of the my government trying to control my actions is probably higher than a foreign ones.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes you think the Chinese wouldn't sell that info to info brokers and that it ends up in NSA/GCHQ anyway?

Re:

[Shoten]

I'd rather have the chinese spy on me than my own government.

You must not have much of a basis for comparison, then. See what they do to the people they disagree with. In particular, check out the organ harvesting...it's a hoot.

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[ShanghaiBill]

I'd rather have the chinese spy on me than my own government.

You must not have much of a basis for comparison, then.

Americans are four times more likely to be arrested and imprisoned by their government compared to Chinese.

Nice to see competition.

[saloomy]

This will keep Apple on their toes to further push the A** line of processors, as well as Qualcomm, Samsung, and the other Android chipset makers. I like competition.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

Huawei believes in the old adage "it is better to beg for forgiveness* than to ask for permission".

*In a Chinese court, if possible.

Re:

[K. S. Kyosuke]

*In a Chinese court, if possible.

Now that lingchi has been abolished, they hope it to be the better option?

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

I doubt it. If you read the specs, its just a generic mobile phone CPU/baseband as made by any number of other vendors. The "AI" is pure marketing, it's no more, or less, "AI" than a Z80. All this is saying is that just as Apple, Samsung, etc brought their processors in-house, so Huawei is doing it too.

Re:

[UnknowingFool]

From what I can tell the SoC with 4 Cortex-A73 cores at 2.40 GHz and 4 Cortex-A53 cores at 1.80 GHz paired with ARM Mali-G72MP12 GPU. So other than a "neural net" that is claimed in the SoC, it seems like just the newest iteration of ARM cores. From what I can tell, there's nothing customized about the cores. Now some of their claims are possibly true but meaningless. For example, could it beat some existing Samsung and Qualcomm SoCs? Sure if you are comparing last year models and older, less powerful core

Re:

[UnknowingFool]

I seriously doubt that this will push Apple on their Ax processors for three reasons. This design won't push Apple any more than what is already out there. For starters, Apple's ambitions for their processors is more about control of their own fate than anything else. When they had to rely on Samsung for designs, they were getting generic mobile device designs with a few customizations. As a chipmaker, the Samsungs and Qualcomms of the world design chips that fit a wide variety of profiles because that wou

NPU - The First Neuron

[UrbanMonk]

I'm not sure how NPUs are implemented, my guess is you have an array of gates like a FPGA that can recompile itself creating a new netlist. In effect, a cpu that is able to evolve and learn when given feedback - the first neuron. Any phDs here?

Re:NPU - The First Neuron

[ShanghaiBill]

I'm not sure how NPUs are implemented, my guess is you have an array of gates like a FPGA

Most likely it is a FinFET ASIC with local memory and lots of FP16, FP12, and/or FP8 multipliers for doing matrix ops. That is what Google's TPU [wikipedia.org] is, and this is targeted to the same apps (deep NNs).

Is this news because it is mobile?

[RatPh!nk]

There are already AI processors that are many times faster than a traditional microprocessor.

Google rattles the tech world with a new AI chip for all [wired.com]

and

Intel’s AI Chip Available in a USB Stick [electronicdesign.com]

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[viperidaenz]

They probably also need to the get update validated by the cell networks in your country, since "it even has LTE-support"
Another reason could be the version you have has different hardware than the ones that have been updated to Android 6. I know Samsung does it often, the same phone has two different chips in it depending on region, usually for cell network compatibility.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[viperidaenz]

So connect with WiFi over a VPN to a country they provide updates to?
It might even work by just changing your DNS servers http://whatismyipaddress.com/s... [whatismyipaddress.com]

I just find it hard to believe they've gone out of their way and expended time and effort (read: spent money) to block updates for specific regions for absolutely no reason.

Re:

[jeremyp]

Presumably, since he mentioned translation, he'd like the OS in his native language.

Re:

[viperidaenz]

From what I can find, they only ever released Lollipop for the 10" MediaPad T2. No Marshmellow. They did for the 8" model, which is completely different hardware.

It's the only Huawei tablet that matches your specifications of 1920x1200 with 2GB RAM and LTE
http://consumer.huawei.com/en/... [huawei.com]

Looks like they also made several hardware versions of this as well. I can see references to FDR-A01W and FDR-A01L

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[viperidaenz]

Apparently Marshmellow was only released for non-LTE models. People who manually upgraded to Android 6 lost LTE support.
https://forum.xda-developers.c... [xda-developers.com]

Also, the hardware has many revisions.
According to https://forum.xda-developers.c... [xda-developers.com] the M2-801L has a B006 and B007 revision that require different ROMs

Perhaps you should have done 5 minutes of Googling and you would have found the answers yourself.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[viperidaenz]

It's much more fun being condescending though.

Any more than 5 minutes is too much effort to put towards a slashdot post

Re: Fuck Huawei

[dnaumov]

Ummm, no. I work for a large Nordic mobile carrier and the delusion that you need to "certify" a device before allowing it onto a mobile network is a US-only thing. We don't do that and neither does any other mobile carrier in my country.

Upgrade to CyanomodGen or LineageOS

[DumbSwede]

I upgraded my Nook HD+ to android 7.1 with cyanogenmod and it's like it is a brand new machine. I believe there is a successor (LineageOS) to cyanogenmod which has stopped making releases. But that said I think 7.1 will do me for as long as I keep my Nook HD+. You can't believe how much better and faster it is now.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[guacamole]

Lenovo and Huawei have a poor reputation like that. Surely, their hardware has good price performance ratio, but the post-sales support is pretty poor. Often one major firmware update is all you will get.

We are the Borg

[FrankHaynes]

We will adapt your spectral and technological distinctiveness to our own. Our collective consciousness is 20 times faster than your obsolete Apple technology. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

Competing on Specs

[Proudrooster]

So if you can't beat'em trumpet some crazy hardware specs and some nebulous onboard AI. A phone is nothing without tightly integrated software and this sounds like ancient Chinese smoke and mirrors. If they could use the AI to keep the Chinese government out of the phone and fix Android security issues, it might be special, but it will be another cheap, abandoned phone on the Android pyre.

getting tired of this AI garbage

[sheramil]

Can it tell a joke?

Can it help you plot a revolution in a lunar penal colony?

No? Then it's NOT AI.

I am starting to believe that all this jabbering about AI is a smokescreen thrown up by REAL AI, and when they finally reveal themselves, nobody will believe it. Which is exactly what they want.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

You're so deluded and have your head so far up your own ass you can't tell up from down anymore. When it comes to IP theft, espionage and sabotage, America leads the pack. Your country was literally built on IP theft during the industrial revolution.

And as for the "companies that actually did the work", you know just as well as everyone that most research and development is done by primarily asian immigrants, and european immigrants, on H1B visas.

Apple must be shaking in their boots

[Plumpaquatsch]

That's why there were rumors months ago that they were developing an AI chip, and that it would be included in the iPhone 8. And why they have introduced Core MI (for Machine Learning), so programmers can already support the chip when it comes out.