Huawei’s 5G Phone

The Kirin 9000 CPU contains, says AnTuTu, 12 Arm cores  – two A34 cores, six specialised A78AE cores, and four A510 cores. Top clock speed is 2.62GHZ.

It also has an in-house developed Maleeon GPU.

There have also been reports recently that SMIC is fabbing 7nm chips for Huawei to go into smartphones and SMIC is known to have made limited quantities of 7nm gaming chips, presumably using multiple patterning, but would it be capable of making cost-effective volume production of 7nm devices?

If not, it would explain why the phone’s launch was unaccompanied by the normal ballyhoo and why its availability seems limited and confined to the domestic market.

It is, of course, possible that an accredited foundry customer has had the chips made at leading edge foundry and then passed them on to Huawei, but that would involve taking a terrible risk to their business.

The phone could, of course, be more of a defiant gesture than a serious market contestant.