SoC "Kirin 970" equipped with the world's first AI processor "NPU" opens the mobile AI era

Home appliance trade fair held in Huawei in Germany "IFA 2017The world's first SoC with built-in dedicated processor "NPU" for AI processing "Kirin 970We announced. Although it is an AI technology that will become a key technology for mobile terminals such as smartphones, it will be key technologies such as image processing and voice assistant, but with the advent of the NPU, AI processing can be done fast and safely on the terminal side.

Huawei Reveals the Future of Mobile AI at IFA 2017 - Huawei Press Center
http://www.huawei.com/en/news/2017/9/Mobile-AI-IFA-2017

Huawei announces the Kirin 970 - new flagship SoC with AI capabilities | AndroidAuthority
http://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-announces-kirin-970-797788/

Huawei announced the new SoC "Kirin 970".


Kirin 970 is a SoC made by Huilly Technologies under Huawei, a high-end SoC whose CPU adopts Cortex-A 73 (4 cores) + Cortex-A 53 (4 cores) and GPU uses Mali-G 72 (12 cores). Manufacturing is done in TSMC's 10 nm process, with die size reduced by 40% and power efficiency by 20% with the ratio of Kirin 960 of the previous high-end SoC. H.265 / HEVC decoding at 2160 p · 60 fps is possible, LTE modem corresponds to Cat 18. It corresponds also to DSDS (dual SIM standby) with 4G + 4G.


Also, it will achieve 20% performance & up to 50% power efficiency by GPU optimization.


However, the biggest feature of Kirin 970 is that SoC is equipped with an AI processor called "Neural network processing unit (NPU)".

Introducing Kirin 970 - YouTube


"I am AI"


"I am not in the cloud"


"Always be near you."


"Only for you"


Kirin 970 is the world's first "mobile AI processor"


Built-in NPU dedicated to AI processing adopting Huawei's proprietary AI computing architecture.


Kirin 970 is an innovative SoC that creates smartphone intelligence.


We will open up the mobile AI era.


The general AI service is done on a cloud basis that enables high-speed computation processing. However, beyond processing in the cloud, we can not deny that there are inconveniences in using the AI ​​service, such as poor response and anxiety about security. Therefore, Huawei incorporated NPU dedicated to deep learning processing in SoC so that inference of deep learning can be performed by mobile terminal alone rather than cloud. The NPU incorporated in the Kirin 970 is capable of AI computation up to 25 times in terms of CPU ratio and the power efficiency is up to 50 times.


According to Huawei, the computing performance of NPU of Kirin 970 is 1.92 TFLOPS at FP16. Huawei positions Kirin 970 as an open platform for mobile AI and plans to distribute API for developers. Deep learning development framework supports Tensorflow / Tensorflow Lite and Coffe / Coffe 2.

The mobile AI processor "Kirin 970" with the world's first AI processor "NPU" built in will be released next October 16, the next high-end smartphone "Huawei Mate 10It is installed in.