The Pura 70 flagship series officially launched by Huawei also sports the company’s new Kirin 9010, a 12-core SoC that delivers a slew of improvements over its predecessor, the Kirin 9000S from last year. However, regarding lithography, the Kirin 9010 and Kirin 9000S are pretty much identical, with a teardown revealing that Huawei stuck with SMIC’s 7nm process to mass produce its latest SoC.
The lack of advanced manufacturing machinery prevented Huawei from creating a ‘next-generation’ 5nm Kirin chip for the Pura 70 lineup, but it could arrive with the Mate 70 series later this year
Even though the Kirin 9010 is regarded as the direct successor to the Kirin 9000S, TechInsights revealed in its latest teardown of the Pura 70 Ultra that the chipset sticks with the same 7nm node from SMIC, China’s largest semiconductor manufacturer. Earlier, we believed that Huawei had little choice but to re-use this technology because SMIC was reportedly setting up new production lines to mass manufacture 5nm wafers later in the year.
This meant that the Kirin 9010 would need to be delayed to use the 5nm process, or Huawei would resort to using the same 7nm node, meaning it would have to tweak the SoC heavily and set it apart from the Kirin 9000S in performance and efficiency. Thankfully, Huawei improved the Kirin 9010 considerably, but only when compared to the company’s previous chipset. Against the competition, a series of tests revealed that the Kirin 9010 delivers slower performance than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 while consuming 30 percent more power, all thanks to using a less efficient architecture.
Thanks to the U.S. export control ban, Huawei lacks access to TSMC’s current-generation and older nodes, and it can only rely on SMIC now. Unfortunately, that will not solve the bigger problem. ASML, the Dutch-based firm that supplies cutting-edge EUV machinery to clients worldwide, including TSMC, has been barred from selling any equipment to Chinese entities, forcing SMIC to re-purpose its older DUV hardware.
While mass producing a 5nm Kirin chipset is possible, a previous report stated that chip prices could be up to 50 percent higher than TSMC’s at the same lithography. Regardless, the fact that Huawei persevered and produced the Kirin 9010 with the trade ban in place is a miracle in its own right, so it is likely that shortly, the company will find some way to mass produce a 5nm SoC for the upcoming Mate 70 series.
News Source: TechInsights
