Huawei's new Mate 70 smartphone chip is 'not a major redesign', teardown report finds

Huawei Technologies' new Mate 70 smartphones feature an in-house designed processor that does not show major improvements, indicating the Chinese tech champion's ongoing struggles over US sanctions that restrict its access to advanced semiconductors, according to a new report.

The Mate 70 Pro+, one of four models in the latest Mate 70 series released last month, features the Kirin 9020 system-on-chip, according to a report published on Wednesday by Canadian semiconductor research firm TechInsights, which did a teardown on the 5G smartphone.

"This chip is not a major redesign for the Kirin line," TechInsights said.

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The industry has closely monitored the Mate 70's release for insights into Huawei's progress in chip development. Last year, the US-blacklisted firm surprised analysts and US policymakers by incorporating a 7-nanometre chip from Chinese foundry Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) in its Mate 60-series smartphones.

The latest findings contradict enthusiasm on Chinese social media platforms like Bilibili, where users celebrated the 9020 as a "fully home-grown chip" with a 30 per cent performance boost over the older 9000s and 9010 processors from the Mate 60 Pro, released in 2023.

People queue outside a Huawei store at the Wangfujing shopping area in Beijing on November 26, 2024. Photo: AFP alt=People queue outside a Huawei store at the Wangfujing shopping area in Beijing on November 26, 2024. Photo: AFP>

The findings come a week after the US intensified its export controls on China's semiconductor industry, adding 140 Chinese semiconductor firms to a trade blacklist and banning sales of high-bandwidth memory chips to China, in moves aimed at preventing US-core tech from being used to improve China's military capabilities.

The new processor shares similar package markings with the Kirin 9000S and 9010 processors, but has a 15 per cent larger die size, suggesting the use of chiplet technology - a design approach that could help China work around its chipmaking limitations under US sanctions.

Contrary to speculation that the Kirin 9020 was made with SMIC's 5-nm process, TechInsights suggested that China's top foundry manufactured the chip using the same 7-nm process as last year's Kirin 9010 processor, making it an enhanced version of that chip.

Sales of Huawei's latest flagship are expected to fall short of the demand generated by the Mate 60, owing to the new model's weaker processor performance and heightened supply chain risks amid geopolitical tensions, according to TechInsights analysts Peng Peng and Linda Sui, writing in a previous report. They project Mate 70 sales to reach 3 million units in the fourth quarter of this year, representing about 22 per cent of Huawei's total smartphone shipments during the period.

Total shipments of the Mate 70-series handsets are expected to exceed 10 million units throughout its life cycle, according to Counterpoint Research.

Apart from the modest chip upgrades, the TechInsights report shows how the Mate 70's appeal would be limited outside China because it is based on Huawei's own HarmonyOS Next, which excludes support for Android apps.

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