September 5, 2023
Huawei Technologies and China’s top chipmaker SMIC have unveiled a new 7-nanometer processor for Huawei’s latest smartphone, the Mate 60 Pro.
The Kirin 9000s chip was made in China by SMIC, and is the first to utilize the company’s most advanced 7nm technology. The development is a major step forward for China’s chip industry, and is seen as a “slap in the face” to the United States, which has restricted Huawei’s access to American chipmaking tools.
The Mate 60 Pro is capable of download speeds exceeding those of top line 5G phones, and has been praised for its performance and battery life. The phone is currently only available in China, but is expected to be released in other markets soon.
According to screenshots provided by Huawei Central, Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin 9000S appears to be a rather intricate System-on-Chip (SoC). It houses four high-performance cores, with one capable of reaching speeds up to 2.62 GHz and two others maxing out at 2,150 MHz.
Additionally, it integrates four energy-efficient cores that can operate at speeds up to 1,530 MHz. These cores are designed based on Huawei’s proprietary TaiShan microarchitecture, which still seems to be rooted in the Armv8a ISA.
The SoC also includes the Maleoon 910 graphics processing unit, which can run at a maximum of 750 MHz. When compared to the clock speeds of Arm’s cores found in earlier HiSilicon SoCs, both the CPU and GPU cores in the Kirin 9000S operate at relatively lower frequencies.
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.
