At its conference in IFA 2018 in Berlin, Huawei announced its Kirin 980 chipset based on the 7nm fabrication process. This next-gen chip will take on Apple’s upcoming A12 chipset and Qualcomm’s flagship chipset for 2019 devices presumably called the Snapdragon 855 for now.

The Kirin 980 features ARM’s Cortex-A76 CPU, Mali-G76 GPU, and an integrated Cat.21 modem that is capable of reaching download speeds of up to 1.4Gbps. The chipset also supports LPDDR4X RAM clocked at up to 2,133MHz. Huawei says that it went through over 5,000 different engineering prototypes while developing the Kirin 980. The end result is a 20 percent improvement in performance and a 40 percent reduction in power consumption. The octa-core chip features two turbo performance cores, followed by two long-term performance cores, and four low-power cores for daily tasks. Both performance clusters make use of ARM’s Cortex-A76 cores.

Apart from an impressive 1.4Gbps modem, the Kirin 980 is also capable of supporting Wi-Fi speeds of 1,732Mbps which is significantly higher than the 833Mbps supported by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 chipset.

Huawei made direct comparisons with Qualcomm’s existing Snapdragon 845 chipset. It claims the Kirin 980 offers 20 percent better bandwidth and 22 percent lower latency when compared to Qualcomm’s offering. It also consumes 32 percent lower power than the Kirin 980 while running games at 22 percent high frame rates. When compared to its own Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 chipset, Huawei is claiming a 37 percent performance improvement.

To massively improve the photography experience and power its next-generation of camera hardware, the Kirin 980 features a dual ISP that brings about a 46 percent improvement in performance and 23 percent improvement in power efficiency. Huawei’s last year Kirin 970 chip featured a dedicated NPU and with Kirin 980, Huawei is doubling down on it. The Kirin 980 features dual NPU thereby allowing it to excel at AI-related tasks. The dual-NPU allows the Kirin 980 to recognize images using AI at a rate of 4,500 per minute which is significantly higher than Snapdragon 845’s 2,371 and Apple A11’s 1,458.

Huawei will first be debuting the Kirin 980 inside its own Honor Magic 2 and Mate 20 devices which are scheduled to release in October this year.