When Huawei surprised everyone by introducing the new Mate 60 series last August, the big news was that the phones were powered by a new 5G Kirin chip produced by China's leading foundry, SMIC, using its 7nm process node. The Kirin 9000s SoC was the first 5G chipset inside a Huawei phone since the Mate 40 series was released in 2020. The U.S. had expanded its export rules the same year which prevented foundries using American technology to build chips from shipping advanced silicon to Huawei.

U.S. lawmakers and officials are believed to be investigating how SMIC was able to produce the Kirin 9000s application processor (AP) and whether any U.S. sanctions were violated by the foundry. And now, according to Huawei Central, prolific leaker Digital Chat Station has turned to his Weibo account to post about a new flagship Kirin chip that is reportedly being developed by Huawei and will be manufactured by SMIC.

One rumor calls for the new Kirin chip to be produced using a 5nm process node which would really get the attention of U.S. officials. SMIC is blocked by the U.S. and the Dutch from receiving the extreme ultraviolet lithography machine that would typically be required to etch the very thin circuitry patterns on silicon wafers required to produce such advanced chips. While SMIC does own deep ultraviolet lithography machines, it might be extremely difficult to use them to manufacture chips using a 5nm node.

Huawei is also believed to be working on a new and advanced Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for AI tasks and is also said to be working on building future Kirin chips using a 64-bit structure. The AP, rumored to carry the Kirin 9010 name, will feature Huawei's own Balong 6000 modem. On Geekbench 6, the chip reportedly had a single-core score of 1800 with a multi-core score of 4800. It features the Maleoon 920 GPU (6CUs, 750MHz clock speed) and the latest dual-core Ascend NPU (1 big core + 1 small core).

There is no word as to when this chip might be released although the Mate 70 series is expected later this year.

By: DocMemory
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