Huawei’s new Kirin 9010 chipset is slower while consuming the same power as 2022’s Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1.
After shocking the world with the 7nm Kirin 9000s 5G chipset that powers the Mate 60 series, Huawei reportedly made some internal improvements for its next chipset, the Kirin 9010. Remember, U.S. export rules put into place in 2020 are supposed to keep Huawei from obtaining 5G application processors, and at first, the sanctions worked. The manufacturer had to obtain a license from U.S. Customs in order to obtain versions of the Snapdragon chips it used for the P50, Mate 50, and P60 flagship models. And those chips were tweaked to prevent them from working with 5G signals.
Huawei supposedly has made some big improvements to the Kirin 9010 giving it a 12-core CPU cluster. But the inability of SMIC, China’s largest foundry and the one that built the Kirin 9000s, to obtain cutting-edge lithography machines leaves one performance core on the Kirin 9010 30% slower than the Cortex-X2 big core used on 2022’s Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 when consuming the same amount of power.
