HONOR 9X to Come Equipped with Flagship-level Kirin 810 Chipset

A recent disclosure reveals that new generation of Honor X series models will carry the Kirin 810 chipset, a new flagship-worthy processor rarely seen in mid-range models. This revelation has enormous implications for the budget smartphone market, and would represent an enormous leap in computing for Honor.

Kirin 810: cutting-edge AI through a redesigned NPU
The Kirin 810 is the fourth 7nm chip that has hit the market, following Huawei's Kirin 980, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855, and Apple's A12 Bionic. It utilizes a proprietary NPU developed by Huawei, which offers high-end AI performance by employing a novel approach.

Due to the wide application of artificial intelligence in all facets of life, implementing it in consumer devices has been a fertile area for chipset research and development. The Kirin 970 featured the first AI hardware processing unit specially designed for a chipset, improving speed while reducing power consumption. The upgraded Kirin 980 came equipped with two NPUs (Neural-network Processing Units), reinventing smartphone AI by unlocking such advanced features as calorie counting, customized image coloring, and image text-extracted translations. The Kirin 810 features a brand new NPU based on Huawei's proprietary Da Vinci architecture, improving AI performance in the unit area by exploiting latent computing potential at the edges.

The Honor X series will make use of the Kirin 810's cutting-edge AI to bring advanced technology into the consumer mainstream. As the upcoming flagship model in the Honor X series, the Honor 9X tells of the Chinese brand's commitment to relentless improvement.


What does the Kirin 810 bring to the table?
Most smartphone chipsets contain four "high-powered" large cores and four "efficiency" little cores, which interact to balance the competing demands for performance and power saving. The Kirin 810 forgoes the traditional architecture by packing six small cores and two large cores. This allows for more nimble and flexible CPU resource allocation, to account for widely differing app requirements, resulting in optimally efficient system power management.

The Kirin 810's computing prowess has been confirmed by hard data. At the Geekbench 4.2 tests, the Kirin 810 outperformed the Kirin 710 in single-core performance by 89%, and the Snapdragon 710 by more than 80%.

At the ETH Benchmark test, the Kirin 810's NPU scored 32,000+, far exceeding the Snapdragon 710 (6,556) and Snapdragon 730 (13,000+), as well as the Snapdragon 855 (25,000+). The results from both tests demonstrate that the Honor 9X will assuredly join the ranks of high-end flagship phones, in terms of processing performance — remarkably, at a fraction of the price!

Consumers still have to wait to see how the Kirin 810 will interact with other diverse new technologies on the Honor 9X, but early indications suggest that the new model will make pioneering AI features more effective and broadly accessible.