When the Kirin 970 was first released, Huawei constantly emphasized the NPU (neural network unit) of the Kirin 970. The Kirin 970 uses the HiAI AI architecture and has very efficient AI computing performance through the built-in NPU. Now, Huawei has released HiKey 970, a development board equipped with Kirin 970.

On March 19, Huawei released the HiKey 970 development board at the Linaro Developers Conference in Hong Kong. This is Huawei's third-generation development board. It integrates the HiAI framework and the mainstream neural network framework. It can accelerate AI computing through NPUs in the Kirin 970, which can improve the performance by 25 times and the energy efficiency ratio by 50 times. The HiKey 970 provides some mainstream interfaces for development. Huawei said that this development board can adapt to the current development work in the fields of deep learning algorithms, AI robots, AI cities, etc., so that these AI development can be carried out more efficiently. Huawei HiKey 970 will be officially launched in mid April this year.