Mali-G72 High Performance GPU debuts in HiSilicon's Kirin 970 SoC

For those of us who arguably take our tech a little too seriously, the first time a brand new product appears in real-life silicon is pretty exciting. I imagine it’s a bit like an architect seeing a house for the first time rather than a series of drawings, and it makes the whole process feel worthwhile. When that product is appearing in the silicon that will power a ground-breaking, next generation flagship device from one of our fastest growing partners, it gets even more exciting. This is where Huawei, and their in-house SoC designer, HiSilicon, come in. After an announcement that wasn’t quite an announcement came Huawei’s all-important IFA keynote, providing a lot more detail about the Kirin 970 SoC and the two major devices it will initially power.

The Kirin 970, built on a 10nm process node, is the successor to the Kirin 960 which powered the Mate 9 smartphone and featured a nine core configuration of the very first High performance GPU based on the Bifrost architecture, the Mali-G71. I’m sure it will surprise you not at all to discover that the Kirin 970 proudly sports our latest High performance GPU, the Mali-G72, released earlier this year at Computex. This is the first SoC announced that will feature the Mali-G72 and HiSilicon never fail to impress with the speed and efficiency with which they bring their chip designs to silicon, and then to the device.

Implemented in a 12 core configuration, Mali-G72 will pack a serious graphical punch. Designed for latest generation use cases like High Fidelity Mobile Gaming and VR, Mali-G72 supports specialised features like foveated rendering and 8x Multi Sample Anti-Aliasing for the highest quality, most immersive experience possible. A multitude of architectural optimisations in the execution engine, tile buffer and caches, to name but a few, are designed to get the very best performance out of a minimal silicon budget with maximum energy efficiency. With 25% more energy efficiency, 20% more performance per mm² and 1.4x the overall graphics performance of its predecessor, Mali-G72 will ensure the Kirin 970 provides the best graphical experience imaginable. The visuals don’t stop there though, with the Kirin 970 able to support 4K video with up to the minute encode and decode standards. 

Alongside such solid graphics performance there is also a whole lot of Arm goodness happening on the compute side too. With four premium Cortex-A73 ‘big’ cores and four Cortex-A53 ‘LITTLE’ cores, the Kirin 970 is taking advantage of the latest and greatest in both graphics and compute, balancing workloads to get the most from the system as a whole. HiSilicon reported 20% more performance for the 970 vs the 960 and 50% more energy efficiency. These are fantastic numbers by anyone’s standards but for a partner so comparatively new it’s fantastic to see such achievements.

If you’ve kept even a passing acquaintance with our partners release cycles you’ll likely have been able to figure out that the devices we’ve alluded to are the Huawei Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro. Both will be powered by the Kirin 970 and are due to launch on October 16^th in Munich. Focusing on the latest up and coming tech, AI, it will be super exciting to see the capabilities of the next generation of Mali-powered devices.

Stay tuned for the latest updates as they hit the market!