Rumor: Kirin 1020 will be Huawei’s first soc with 5G support

Huawei’s HiSilicon chip division is reportedly working on the Kirin 1020, its first soc with 5G support. The Kirin 1020 should be out when the first 5G networks for smartphones go live next year.

The modem in the Kirin 1020 will support those 5G networks upon release, Anzhuo reports. The rumor does not mention which frequencies and which techniques the modem of the Kirin 1020 can handle, but it is obvious that it concerns 5g on, among other things, the 700MHz and 3.5GHz frequencies. It seems that most hardware will be able to handle these frequencies in the coming year.

The Kirin 1020 would also be twice as fast as the current Kirin 970 from the P20 Pro, P20, Honor 10 and Mate 10 Pro, the Chinese site reports. Whether this concerns computing power, graphics power, calculations for neural networks or specific benchmarks is unknown.

Before the Kirin 1020 comes out, Huawei is still working on the Kirin 980, presumably the first smartphone soc that TSMC makes on its 7nm process. Samsung and TSMC are now making the latest high-end socs at 10nm. Huawei has used new socs for the first time on Mate phones in recent years, which will be released in the fall.