Huawei launches new mid-range HiSilicon Kirin 820 5G platform

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Earlier this month, a 3C certification listing of the Honor 30S suggested that the smartphone might be the first from the company to feature Huawei’s all-new HiSilicon Kirin 820 5G platform. At the time, we had no information about the new chipset from the company, except for the fact that it would be a mid-range chip with 5G support. Now, at the recently concluded Honor 30S launch event in China, the company has finally announced the new Kirin 820 5G chipset.

As expected, the HiSilicon Kirin 820 5G platform is targeted at the mid-range smartphone segment and it’s a minor step up from the older Kirin 810 platform. Much like the Kirin 810, the new chipset is based on a 7nm architecture and consists of four ARM Cortex A76 big cores and four ARM Cortex A55 little cores. However, unlike the Kirin 810, which had all of its A76 cores clocked at 2.2GHz, this new SoC has one A76 core clocked at 2.36GB, while the other three are clocked at 2.22GHz. Thanks to this new approach, the new SoC boasts of up to 27% improved performance over the older chip.

On the GPU front, the Kirin 820 5G makes use of a Mali-G57 6-core GPU, which offers 38% better performance over the Mali-G52 GPU on the Kirin 810. The updated GPU also brings support for GPU Turbo and Kirin Gaming+ 2.0. Huawei has also packed in an in-house NPU on the Kirin 820, which improves AI performance by 73% over the Kirin 810.

Additionally, much like its flagship Kirin 990 chip, the Kirin 820 pack in Kirin ISP 5.0 which brings support for BM3D SLR image noise reduction, video dual-domain noise reduction, and support for 4K video capture at 60fps.

To offer 5G capabilities, the Kirin 820 packs in the same modem as the Kirin 990, which supports dual-mode SA/NSA 5G. The all-new Honor 30S is the first device to feature the new Kirin 820 5G chipset and we can’t wait to get our hands on the device to see how the new platform stacks up against Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 765G.