New Huawei chip has performance inferior to Snapdragon from 2022

Huawei's new processor chip is Kirin 9010, the successor to the Kirin 9000s manufactured on a 7 nm process with some improvements including 12 CPU cores. Kirin 9010 is used by the Chinese technology company on the Pura 70 line - a model that was opened for online sale on April 18 and sold out after just one minute.

New Huawei chip has performance inferior to Snapdragon from 2022 Picture 1

Specific specifications of the processor were not announced, but the Kirin 9010 is said to have a main core of 2.3 GHz, 3 high-performance cores of 2.18 GHz and 4 energy-saving cores of 1.55 GHz.

According to Phonearena, Kirin 9010 has 30% lower single-core performance than the Cortex-X2 core of Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. The reason is that China's largest chip manufacturer, SMIC, is being heavily affected by sanctions. US penalty. Currently SMIC can only produce 7nm chips because it only has DUV ultraviolet lithography machines, and there is a shortage of EUV lithography technology.

Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 is manufactured by TSMC on a 4 nm process, launched two years ago. Kirin 8010 consumes 50% more power, when compared with the Cortex-A77 core on Snapdragon 870, a mid-range smartphone processor.

In early April, Huawei registered a copyright for a low-tech lithography system that could help it achieve a 5 nm process chip line. This shows that it will be difficult for Huawei's Kirin chip to catch up with the power of products from competitors without a significant breakthrough in the near future.

Despite limitations in processor power, the Mate 60 series and the latest Pura 70 series still sell very well in China. This shows that the performance gap between Kirin and Snapdragon is not a problem for users in the billion-people market. Thanks to that, Huawei will have more time and resources to narrow the gap in chip production with TSMC.

Isabella Humphrey

Update 23 April 2024