Until now, advanced manufacturing processes have been thought to give chips advantages in performance and power consumption, but Huawei, with its new processor design philosophy, hopes to prove that there are alternative ways of progress. Its latest Kirin 9050 Pro processor is close to 7nm products in terms of manufacturing process and has proven to be faster than the 3nm Apple A17 Pro chip in multiple tests.
Image source: Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
as mentioned before South China Morning Post Citing Bernstein’s report, in the Geekbench 6 test of multi-core processors, the advanced Huawei HiSilicon chip is faster than the 3nm Apple A17 Pro processor released in 2023. This was the first processor to be mass-produced using TSMC’s 3nm technology. At the same time, the Kirin 9050 Pro’s production process is closer to 7nm, and this comparison allows Bernstein analysts to claim that China’s mobile device chips are now only three years behind the West compared to the first four years observed in the previous generation.
Along the way, it’s worth noting that in the multi-core part of the test, the Kirin 9050 Pro’s performance was 30% weaker than the most advanced 2nm processor, the Apple A20 Pro, while in the single-core part it was roughly on par with the 4nm processor produced by TSMC. Bernstein said that Huawei’s latest processor is manufactured by China’s SMIC using N+2 or N+3 level technology. Its performance is equivalent to Taiwan’s 7nm, but it uses deep ultraviolet (DUV) laser equipment instead of advanced EUV. Due to Western sanctions, China cannot obtain EUV at all.
Bernstein analysts concluded that Huawei’s progress should not be underestimated, as the transition to a new chip architecture (Logic Folding), which “folds” a layer of transistors in half and organizes the vertical connections between the two halves, has apparently allowed the Chinese company to move forward in the face of technological limitations. Bernstein experts believe that this approach allowed Huawei to increase the transistor density by more than 50%, from 155 to 238 million per square millimeter of chip area.
Compared with the previous generation Kirin 9030 Pro processor, the performance of the new model in the multi-core part tested by Geekbench has increased by 20%, and the graphics performance has increased by 39%. The neural coprocessor can increase its throughput by 150%. Huawei’s own tests also show that with the same performance, the new processor consumes less power.
Similar chip design decisions will be used for future Ascend 970 and 980 series AI accelerators, released in 2028 and 2029 respectively. The Kirin 9050 Pro processor, which debuted this month as part of the foldable smartphone Huawei Mate XT 2, became the first carrier of the new technology architecture.
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