Huawei today introduced the Mate 70 series of flagship smartphones, as well as the Mate X6 foldable smartphone. In official press releases, the manufacturer did not disclose which processors are used in these devices, nor in the descriptions on its website. Chinese media suggested that we are talking about the new Kirin 9020 chip, the direct successor to the Kirin 9010. Now confirmation of this data has been found.
Image source: Huawei
One Weibo user posted a photo of a Mate 70 series smartphone with on-screen processor specs displayed in the OS settings. Let us remind you that new Huawei devices run the proprietary software platform HarmonyOS Next.
According to the image, the smartphone actually uses the Kirin 9020 processor. The smartphone OS says that it is a 12-core chip with two main cores clocked at up to 2.5 GHz, six medium cores clocked at up to 2.15 GHz, and four small cores clocked at up to 1.6 GHz. In fact, there are eight cores, just some of them support multithreading, which confuses the software.
Image source: Weibo
The previous generation Kirin 9010 chip offered a configuration of physical cores 1+3+4, where only the high and middle cores had multithreading support, which ultimately gave a configuration of logical threads 2+6+4. It is logical to assume that the new Kirin 9020 has a similar core design. It is also believed that the new Kirin chip uses HiSilicon’s Taishan CPU cores for the two older clusters, rather than Arm cores. At the same time, the four small cores are most likely Arm Cortex-A510, like the previous Kirin 9000 series chips. The clock speed of the most powerful core is 2.5 GHz, which is quite modest for a modern flagship chip.
The Kirin 9020 also features a Maleoon 920 GPU clocked at up to 840 MHz. For comparison, the Maleoon 910 of the Kirin 9010 processor operates at up to 750 MHz. There is no information about the architecture of the new GPU and the number of computational units.
According to Huawei’s internal tests, the Kirin 9020 is generally up to 40% faster than its predecessor. According to GSMArena, the regular model of the Huawei Mate 70 smartphone can use the Kirin 9010, while the Kirin 9020 is offered only in the older models Mate 70 Pro, Pro+ and RS Ultimate. The Mate X6 foldable smartphone is also likely to receive a new chipset. However, this is just a guess as Huawei has not provided official information in this regard.