Die shot of Kirin 980 shows off the chip’s floor plan, two different Cortex-A76 designs

The Kirin 980 chipset represents a massive technological improvement over its predecessor, but it’s tiny – at just 74.13mm², it’s a good 30% smaller than the Kirin 970. That’s one of the advantages of the 7nm process. But looking at the die shot (taken by ChipRebel), the CPU and GPU with all their cores take up less than half of the chip.

The 980 is the first chipset by HiSilicon to use ARM’s new DynamIQ technology, which makes it easier to build heterogeneous designs. The DSU – DynamIQ Shared Unit – is the heart of the system. Connected to it are two different pairs of Cortex-A76…