starmobile

avon b7 said:

ericthehalfbee said:

Wasn’t Huawei bragging about their Kirin 970 - trying to steal some thunder just before Apples event?
Sorry,Huawei, you’re not the first to put in a neural processor. You were the first to “announce” it, but it’s all vaporware until you ship devices (which Apple is).
Even so, it’s not that big of a deal - neural processors are not that difficult to design (compared to a CPU or GPU) since they are optimized to perform a few basic tasks really well. The 970 still uses inferior ARM cores (instead of designing their own) or Mali GPUs (again, instead of designing their own). If they really wanted to impress people they should have made a completely custom SoC with their own CPU/GPU cores.

They took the easy way out by designing a much simpler component (nueral procesdor) and trying to make it appear more relevant than it is to make up for their lack of ability to design their own CPU/GPU.

Vapourware? 

They didn't announce it and say, it's coming at some point.

They announced it, they showed it on stage and in the hands of the president, they had boards running the chip right there on the show floor, they had it in the hands of independent testers to test things like the CAT18 modem.

Vapourware? Yeah, whatever you say.

They even gave the date for the announcement of the first phone that will use it. It wasn't earlier because the Mate series is announced in October/November. If they wanted to be first with it shipping in a phone, they could. The processor has been in mass production for a while now and they need far less than Apple. If it isn't available today it's because they set a date and don't need to change it.

So you think neural processors are easy to design? They've been around for a while - but on mobile? No. If it were so easy, everybody would have one. They don't.

This is major step for whoever gets them onto a SoC. Major, but only the first one. Now software is needed.

Huawei develops their own SoCs. They could easily design their own CPU/GPUs too. They choose not too.

Be careful what you wish for. When the US government scuppered a deal for intel to ship Xeons to China for use in supercomputers the Chinese said, OK we'll brew our own. The result was the SW26010 and look what happened then. 

Do you know why Apple depends on other people's designs (not only manufacturing capacity) so much for key elements of its hardware? Because it chooses to. Just like Huawei. Just like everyone that has the resources to go it alone but chooses not to. There are things you prefer to do alone and others you don't.

Huawei is not using the latest ARM cores because it chose not to use them on the Kirin 970. It will use the latest cores on the following design. Using them on the Kirin 970 would have delayed the release. There are other reasons too. With this decision they still have a far better modem than anyone else, dual ISPs, a better sensor controller, the NPU, better efficiencies, far better GPU etc.

And even with the 960 (and below) they recently became the world's second largest handset manufacturer, moving past Apple. They even decided to pull out of the low end.

Apple designs its own chips because it wants differentiation with the rest of the market and is still using external IP on the GPUs on most of its phones and in many other areas. Let's face it, Apple has its biggest eggs in one basket. If the bottom falls out of that basket it wouldn't be a disaster for users, just Apple and Wall Street. The company would still be a billion dollar company. The same cannot be said of Huawei. Until relatively recently it wasn't even in the handset business. Huawei invests a lot in R&D but still has many agreements with other companies. Its phones are the fruit of many different IP agreements and of all kinds. Some are exclusive and some are not. Some involve shared IP and some don't.

Perhaps you are focusing too much on benchmarks and not seeing the bigger picture. Don't forget that Apple has had to play catch-up in many areas with their new phones.