The madness of IFA 2017 may have settled down, but that hasn't stopped Huawei from unveiling its new SoC, the Kirin 970. Under its in-house HiSilicon brand, the Chinese giant seeks to push the boundaries of what is possible with mobile AI. And yes, there are the typical SoC improvements here, too.

Built on a 10nm process, the Kirin 970 sports eight cores and the new 12-core ARM Mali-G72 GPU. There's a new dual ISP on board, too, which will offer things like better noise reduction; a 4.5G modem is also along for the ride, allowing for up to Cat 18 speeds.

The truly interesting part is the Neural Processing Unit (NPU). This addition takes the AI computing load off of the main processor cores, allowing for "25x the performance with 50x the efficiency." Basically, it can theoretically do the same AI stuff much faster than other SoCs on the market. Huawei is also opening up the platform for developers to mess around and find new ways to take advantage of the Kirin 970's capabilities.

We should see this SoC in the forthcoming Mate 10 — color me very, very intrigued.

PRESS RELEASE