We've been able to surmise for a while that Huawei will reveal the Kirin 980 at IFA 2018 at the end of August. And now specs have leaked that reveal some impressive details. 

The silicon will come to the new Huawei Mate 20 and Mate 20 Pro that will probably be with us in October. That processor will almost certainly also power the P21 and P21 Pro that will be with us around March. 

The chip is designed by Huawei subsidiary HiSilicon and will be manufactured on a 7nm process by TSMC; the predecessor platform, Kirin 970, was based on 10nm. Some sources are reporting that this could mean a 20 percent performance improvement, but we can't substantiate that. 

The Kirin 980 will boast eight processing cores - four ARM-designed Cortex A77 cores clocked at 2.8GHz and four Cortex A55 cores. The platform will also use ARM's Mali G72 MP24 graphics with double the cores of last year's unit; 24 vs 12.  

There will also be a second generation neural unit (NPU) and it'll be interesting to see if Huawei talks about the future AI possibilities for their new handsets at IFA. It's unlikely, however, that this platform will have a 5G modem part. 

The super-efficient platform should help to give the upcoming Mate and P handsets an impressive battery life since we're also expecting the Mate 20 to use a large battery - perhaps 4,250mAh as we revealed last week. 

We're also expecting Qualcomm to reveal its Snapdragon 855 chipset before the end of the year - another key platform for next year's flagship phones. 

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