In June this year, Chinese conglomerate Huawei announced that it will roll out a new technology, GPU Turbo, to its Honor line of phones. A few days later it rolled out a detailed plan of the rollout of the technology for both Huawei and Honor smartphones. In the latest development, the company has published a list of Huawei devices that will get the GPU Turbo update as well as the release date of the roll out.
The software dissemination for GPU Turbo will start from August 2018 and the Huawei Mate 10, Mate 10 Pro and Mate RS will be the first set of devices that will get the update. The next in line is the P20 series of phones, the P20 and the P20 Lite, that will get the update in August itself. The list shows that the Huawei P10 and the P10 Plus will be the last devices that will get the update in November this year.
When Huawei made the announcement about GPU Turbo technology in June, it claimed that with hardware-software integration, the technology will dramatically increase graphics processing efficiency of mobile phones and provide users with a smoother and faster mobile experience. At that time, the company listed a few popular Honor phones, such as the Honor 10, Honor View10, Honor 9 Lite and Honor 7X, that will gradually get the update. Huawei claimed that they achieved a technological breakthrough of improving graphics processing efficiency by 60 percent while reducing the System on Chip (SoC) energy consumption by 30 percent.
By June-end, the company reportedly announced the new rollout schedule at an event in Shenzhen, China and provided details as to when the new software feature will be rolled out to devices across various regions. In the original article published on Android Authority, it was reported that only a few devices will get the update in all regions. The website updated the article with a comment from a Huawei representative who confirmed that the GPU Turbo update will not be rolled out to any Huawei smartphone in the US.
The speculated reason of this selective update roll out could be the dispute between the company and US government. For those who are not aware, the US government has said that China could order its manufacturers (Huawei and ZTE) to create backdoors for spying in their devices to locate US soldiers’ exact coordinates and track their movements. In February this year, a group of six major US intelligence heads warned the American citizens to not to use Huawei and ZTE products and services. The Justice Department is also reportedly probing Huawei for possibly violating sanctions against Iran.