According to WinFuture, this chip has significantly more transistors onboard (5.5 billion) than the Snapdragon (3.1 billion). It includes a dedicated "Neural Processing Unit" that appears to consist of purpose-built silicon (as Apple is rumored to have in the works), which differs from Qualcomm's approach on the current Snapdragon 835 (which is inside the latest Galaxy S8 / Note 8 phones as well as LG's V30). There, a "Hexagon" DSP built for other types of number crunching works with the rest of the chip to improve AI performance.

Meanwhile, ARM's updated Core-A75 platform (that Qualcomm and Huawei, among others, rely on) should start rolling out next year and bring with it another boost in AI power.

However it works, the Kirin 970's 8-core CPU and 12-core GPU claims "up to 25x the performance with 50x greater efficiency" than a quad-core Cortex-A73 processor alone. Thanks to its new design, the chip can chew through data faster while using less battery power -- something we can all appreciate. There's no word about the phone or other mobile devices we'll see this inside, but the Mate 10 seems like a sure bet, and there are rumors that device (or one like it) could show up in the US on AT&T early next year.

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