When Huawei debuted its Mate 60 smartphone in mid-2023, it turned heads around the world after teardown artists found it contained a system-on-chip ma

Huawei's latest flagship smartphone contains no world-shaking silicon surprises

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2024-04-19 12:00:07

When Huawei debuted its Mate 60 smartphone in mid-2023, it turned heads around the world after teardown artists found it contained a system-on-chip manufactured by Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) using a 7nm process.

SMIC was thought not to be able to build that sort of thing. So while the Mate 60 didn't differ markedly from every other modern smartphone, its very existence called into question the effectiveness of US-led efforts to prevent advanced chipmaking tech reach the Middle Kingdom.

Much speculation has therefore concerned what Huawei would deliver next, and this week the world got its answer – in the form of the Pura 70.

Chinese media report that early users of the device have posted details of its innards, naming the SoC as Kirin 9010 with four efficient cores running at 1.55GHz, half a dozen performance cores at 2.18GHz, and a couple of high-performance cores zipping along at 2.30GHz. All cores are Arm v8. A third-party spec sheet suggests it's a 7nm chip – meaning Chinese chipmakers appear not to have made another unexpected advance.

Early tests suggest it outperforms the Kirin 9000 found in the Mate 60, but independent assessments are yet to emerge. The crowdsourced evaluations currently available are sometimes dubious.