Huawei has revealed the platform that will power its new 2018-19 phones. The Kirin 980 is the hardware that will be inside the forthcoming Mate 20 as well as the P20 and P20 Pro replacement due early next year which we think will be called the P30 and P30 Pro. 

It's also inside the new bezel-less phone from Honor, the Honor Magic 2

Huawei's new platform is groundbreaking for a few reasons, but primary amongst them is that it heralds a new generation of mobile chips - based on ARM's new Cortex-A76 processor design which is significantly more efficient than older cores - 58 per cent according to Huawei.

There are eight cores in total, but their purpose is split between high intensity and standard use - two of them are based on a different design for super efficiency. Graphics are also handled by a new ARM-designed Mali-G76 processor that promises a 46 per cent improvement over the previous generation. 

The platform also manufactured using the super-efficient 7nm process, which means that Huawei has been able to pack 6.9 billion transistors on a 1cm square. Huawei's deputy general manager of chipsets Benjamin Wang said that "[the move to] 7nm is the biggest engineering challenge we have ever met". We've also recently seen a 7nm chip from Apple, the A12 Bionic in the iPhone XS.

There are also dual neural processors which, says Huawei, will enable much faster on-device image recognition as well as a fast 1.4Gbps 4G LTE modem. No, there's no 5G here. 

When asked about availability of the chipset, Wang said "Well you know there is a Mate 20 launch in London in October". You can watch the unveiling of Huawei's latest device right here on Pocket-lint.

First published August 2018. Updated October 2018.