Honor unveiled the Honor 30 trio recently, as the company’s new flagships. While the Pro and Pro Plus are powered by Kirin 990 chipset, the vanilla Honor 30 sported the new Kirin 985 chipset, making it the first phone to do so.
The new Kirin 985 SoC is Huawei’s third 5G enabled chipset after the flagship Kirin 990 5G and the mid-range Kirin 820 5G which was announced recently. Built on TSMC’s 7nm process, similar to the Kirin 990, it features a single-chip 5G baseband solution without a plug-in.
The Kirin 985 is an Octa-core chipset featuring a single-core ARM Cortex-A76 clocked at 2.58GHz, three ARM Cortex-A76 core clocked at 2.4GHz, and four lower clocked ARM Cortex-A55 core clocking with frequencies of 1.84GHz each. It is built with one large core performance and a tiny core ultra-low consumption Da Vinic-based NPU. The SoC is integrated with ARM Mail-G77 GPU with Kirin gaming+ 2.0 technology to enhance the gaming experience.
The chipset supports the standard 2G / 3G / 4G networks and can also handle dual-mode 5G (NSA/SA). The chipset can get a theoretical maximum downlink link rate of 1277Mbps and uplink rate of 173Mbps. Kirin 985 also features 5G anti-jamming, 5G low-latency, 5G energy-efficient and 5G high-speed performance.
In the Antutu benchmark, the Kirin 985 chipset scored 139694 points in the CPU test and 136626 points in the GPU test. In comparison, the Kirin 820 scored 130080 in the CPU test and 116516 in the GPU test. And, the Snapdragon 765G managed to score 104223 and 92536 respectively.
Kirin chipset has always been battery efficient and same goes for the Kirin 985. Under heavy 5G load power consumption is 503mA and light load takes about 291mA power. The company also mentioned that the 5G modem used in Kirin 985 is 1.5x efficient compared to the X55 modem integrated with the Snapdragon 865 SoC. We can expect more Huawei/Honor devices to feature the Kirin 985 in the coming months.
