The AI platform runs on a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU), basically a piece of hardware that is very good at running neural networks. When compared to the 970’s CPU, the NPU delivers up to 25 times the performance with 50 times greater efficiency. In other words the Kirin 970 NPU can perform the same AI computing tasks faster and with less power.
When it comes to things like AI computing, and in fact super-computing in general, the key benchmark is the number of floating point operations the processor can perform per second. Huawei claim that the NPU in the Kirin 970 can perform 1.92 TFLOPs (i.e. teraFLOPS) when using 16-bit floating point numbers (i.e. FP16).
Looking at the rest of the chip, it is being manufactured by TSMC using a 10nm process. It is an octa-core processor, with a 12-core GPU, dual-ISP and a high speed Cat 18. LTE modem. The CPU is similar to that of the Kirin 960, with four ARM Cortex-A73 cores and four ARM Cortex-A53 cores, but this time clocked at 2.4 GHz and 1.8 GHz respectively. The Kirin 970 is also the first commercial SoC to use the Mali-G72, the latest GPU from ARM.
