Huawei’s premium Mate 70 phones are powered by the 6nm Kirin 9100 application processor.
In August 2023 Huawei stunned the smartphone industry by introducing the 7nm Kirin 9000s application processor (AP) which debuted on the Mate 60 series. The SoC was built by China’s largest foundry, SMIC, and came with 5G support. Thanks to the chipset, the Mate 60 line was the first Huawei flagship phones since 2020’s Mate 40 series to work with 5G signals. That’s because the first Trump administration gave Huawei the ole one-two in 2019 and 2020 with some crushing sanctions that made many believe that Huawei would not survive.U.S. sanctions forced Huawei to be creative in order to survive in the smartphone industry
In 2019, the U.S. put the Chinese manufacturer on the entity list preventing Huawei from using U.S. suppliers without a license. The following year, the Commerce Department made a U.S. export rule change; this change prevented foundries that use American tech to manufacture semiconductors from shipping any chips to Huawei without a license. Huawei, once TSMC’s second largest customer after Apple, was being blocked by the U.S. in order to keep 5G off of its phones and away from the Chinese military.
Some Mate 70 models will be powered by the 6nm Kirin 9100 AP. | Image credit-Huawei
Huawei ended up using Snapdragon chips tweaked not to work on 5G networks to power flagships such as the P50, Mate 50, and P60 handsets.
