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
This chip, called Kirin 9100, will be manufactured on the 6nm node (SMIC N+3). This is a step up from the 7nm Kirin 9000S chips used in the Mate 60 series, but still lags behind the semiconductor nodes that other chipset designers have access to.
telegram user @spektykles This image was posted showing the hardware makeup of the new chip, which is codenamed “HiSilicon Baltimore.” It brings the first Cortex-X CPU cores to the Kirin family. And, interestingly, it is an all-ARM design with all the CPU cores coming from the Cortex lineup. This is in contrast to the Kirin 9000S, which used Taishan large and middle cores (designed by HiSilicon) and four Cortex-A510s as small cores. Here’s 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, middle | 3x Taishan Mid @ 2.15GHz | Cortex-A78 @ 2.32 GHz |
| cpu, small | 4x Cortex-A510 @ 1.53GHz | Cortex-A55 @ 2.02GHz |
| gpu | maloon 910 mp4 | Maloon 910? |
The GPU is listed as “Mali-TBEX”, but it will likely be a MaliON design (from HiSilicon), perhaps the same one we saw on the 9000S and 9010, judging by the second image.
The CPU is made up of very old parts. The Cortex-X1 was paired with the A78 and A55 in the Snapdragon 888 era, while MediaTek never released any chips with the X1 (the Dimensity 9000 uses the X2, A710, and A510). The node is nowhere near the cutting edge, keeping clock speeds low. In fact, they’ve barely advanced compared to 7nm chips.
US sanctions are preventing HiSilicon from using new Cortex designs and more advanced semiconductor nodes, which is holding back the Kirin design.
The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra with the Kirin 9010 showed mid-ranger performance in our tests and while we expect the 9100 to deliver a solid boost with its new CPU, it will still lag far behind modern Android chipsets.
