A week ago, a leak showed the camera island design for the upcoming Huawei Mate 70 series. The new models are expected to feature a new Kirin chipset and now we have our first glimpse of it.
First glimpse of the HiSilicon Kirin 9100 chip that will be used in the Huawei Mate 70 series
Dubbed the Kirin 9100, this chip will be manufactured on a 6nm node (SMIC N+3). That’s a step up from the 7nm Kirin 9000S chips that were used in the Mate 60 series, but still behind the semiconductor nodes that other chipset designers have access to.
Telegram user @spektykles posted this image showing the hardware makeup of the new chip, which is code named “HiSilicon Baltimore”. It brings the first Cortex-X CPU core for Kirin family. And, interestingly, it is an all-ARM design with all CPU cores coming from the Cortex lineup. This is unlike the Kirin 9000S, which used Taishan big and middle cores (designed by HiSilicon) and four Cortex-A510 as the little cores. Here is a side-by-side comparison
| Kirin 9000S | Kirin 9100 (rumored) | |
|---|---|---|
| Node | 7nm | 6nm |
| CPU, big | 1x Taishan Big @ 2.62GHz | Cortex-X1 @ 2.67GHz |
| CPU, mid | 3x Taishan Mid @ 2.15GHz | Cortex-A78 @ 2.32GHz |
| CPU, small | 4x Cortex-A510 @ 1.53GHz | Cortex-A55 @ 2.02GHz |
| GPU | Maleoon 910 MP4 | Maleoon 910? |
The GPU is listed as “Mali-TBEX”, but it will likely be a Maleoon design (from HiSilicon), perhaps the same one that we saw on the 9000S and 9010, judging by the second image.
The CPU is made up of fairly old parts. The Cortex-X1 was paired with A78 and A55 back in the Snapdragon 888 era, while MediaTek never released a chip with the X1 (the Dimensity 9000 uses the X2, A710 and A510). The node isn’t anywhere near the cutting edge too, which keeps clock speeds low. In fact, they’ve barely moved compared to the 7nm chip.
US sanctions are keeping HiSilicon from using newer Cortex designs and more advanced semiconductor nodes, which is holding back the Kirin designs.
The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra with a Kirin 9010 showed mid-ranger performance in our tests and while we expect that the 9100 will be a solid boost with its new CPU, it will still be well behind modern Android chipsets.
