Kirin 9 series chips are the flagship products of Huawei's self-developed chips. With the deepening of Huawei's investment in chip research and development, Kirin 9 series chips have been able to compete with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 series in CPU, AI and 5G in recent years. Judging from the information currently exposed, Kirin 9000 will adopt ARM's Cortex-A78 CPU and Cortex-G78 GPU architecture. Compared with the previous generation A77, single-core performance is improved by 20% and power consumption is reduced by 50%. It can be predicted that the performance of Kirin 9000 is much better than that of Kirin 990 series, and it is likely to surpass Qualcomm's main chip Snapdragon 865 series this year.
Kirin 9000 uses TSMC's 5 nm process chip. At present, the most advanced 5nm process can accommodate1.71300 million transistors per square millimeter. It is estimated that the number of transistors in Kirin 9000 will reach1200 million, which will bring stronger computing performance. Realize the performance, power consumption and heating leap on Kirin 9000 again.
Kirin 9000 will be Huawei's highest-end self-developed mobile phone SoC chip. This year, it will be upgraded with new architecture and new technology, which will be Huawei's strongest Kirin chip so far. We are proud of the strength of Kirin 9000, but TSMC's 5nm process is indispensable behind it. At present, TSMC is the only semiconductor manufacturing company in the world that can stably mass-produce 5nm process chips.
Although TSMC is a technology enterprise in Taiwan Province Province, China, it will stop producing Kirin chips for Huawei due to technology patents and restrictions from upstream suppliers, and the United States will use TSMC to further block Huawei's technology, which will directly affect the future of Huawei's mobile phones.
The Kirin 9000 chip on the upcoming Mate40 series will be the last chip in the Kirin series, which may be the swan song of the Kirin chip, which also means that Huawei Mate 40 will also become an out-of-print Kirin mobile phone. Although TSMC coordinated production capacity to the greatest extent and produced chips for Huawei before the deadline, there were at least 8 million mobile phones equipped with Kirin 9000 chips in this year, so it is inferred that the stock of Kirin 9000 chips is about 8 million, which can only meet the production demand of Huawei's flagship mobile phone for about half a year.
Kirin 9000 chip can barely hold out until the end of the year. In the long run, even if Kirin chips can't be mass-produced in a certain period of time, the technology research and development behind it still needs to continue, so as to keep it in the first echelon in the world technically and prepare for its re-emergence. This is equally important for Huawei and even a country. At present, Huawei and related domestic upstream enterprises are also increasing their investment in technology, just like 5G. Only by mastering the right to speak technology can we get rid of the blockade constraint. Once the domestic semiconductor chip manufacturing industry rises in the future, I believe that Huawei Kirin chips will make a comeback.
The future of Kirin chips has always touched the hearts of Chinese people. As the leading mobile phone chip in the industry, Kirin chip is also the crystallization and achievement of Huawei's investment in technology research and development for many years. Even if Kirin chips can't continue to be produced, Huawei will not give up the task of chip research and development. In the medium and long term, Huawei will not give up the chip business, but may try to expand its business into the field of chip production. But the chip manufacturing industry definitely needs Huawei to accumulate for a long time.