To develop mobile processor and get more shares in the mobile phone market, baseband must follow the speed of development. Undoubtedly mobile communication market in the future will be taken over by the 5G network. So many manufacturers and operators are currently positively working on the 5G network. As an important part to support this network, baseband which supports the corresponding network becomes extremely significant.
At present Qualcomm and Intel have been actively developing their basebands to support 5G network. Qualcomm has launched X50 whose design frequency could reach 5Gbps. And the currently popular Snapdragon X20LTE baseband boosts peak theoretical bandwidth to 1.2Gbps and supports upload speeds of up to 150Mbps. While Intel’ s new finished product is said to not only support 28GHz millimeter wave but also support 6GHz band.
In the competition of speed, Huawei is not willing to lag behind. When interviewed by foreign media Computerbase, the CMO Peter Zhou of Huawei’s wireless solution department expressed that Hisilicon has been working on 5G network (including developing relative baseband), and new Kirin processor which supports this network is also under the development, and at present everything goes well, so the relative finished products will be launched in 2019.
According to Kirin processor’s custom in the past, current Kirin 960 processor will be upgraded to Kirin 970 in the second half of 2017, and then it will be upgraded to Kirin 980 next year. The processor is estimated to change its name (maybe Kirin 990) in 2019, and its performance is absolutely top-level.
