Huawei Mate 70 Series with Kirin 9020: 12-Core CPU, Upgrades

Huawei‘s Mate 70 series has officially launched, introducing the latest flagship devices featuring the new Kirin 9020 chipset. This comes on the heels of the significantly successful Mate 60 lineup introduced this past year and its own bespoke Kirin 9000S silicon that completely blindsided the competition when it came to performance.

The new Kirin 9020 continues this trend with impressive specifications albeit lacking any meaningful discussion on the manufacturing lithography of the chipset. Those limitations are further refined to something new by the Kirin 9020, though all we know from leaks is it will be based on a 6nm process, unlike the 7nm process of other chips.

Huawei Mate 70 Series Unveiled with Kirin 9020 Chipset: 12-Core CPU, Upgraded GPU & More

The Kirin 9020 has a lot going for it, but its biggest strength is its CPU cluster of eight cores. However, because of hyperthreading support, it appears as 12 cores. Some of the leaked info about core config was posted on X by @faridofanani96, showing sub-configuration with two cores clocked at 2.50 GHz, four cores at 1.60GHz, and the remaining cores reaching up to 2.15GHz.

Huawei has a history of custom CPU designs, but the image doesn’t explicitly say whether the company used its own CPU designs in the new chipset or is using ARM’s CPU designs. On the graphics front, the Kirin 9020 is accompanied by the new Maleoon 920 GPU which can run at up to 840MHz. This is a significant upgrade over earlier leaks, which suggested that the older Maleoon 910 GPU would be included.

The inclusion of the Malecon 920 GPU is a positive development, especially for gaming and graphics-intensive tasks. The Kirin 9020’s main drawback, though, is that it uses SMIC’s older lithography node, which simply means it won’t be as fast or power-efficient as chips manufactured on TSMC’s more advanced nodes.

This makes it difficult for the Kirin 9020 to go head-to-head with any other flagship processor in terms of pure power. However, if the new chip is a huge step up from the Kirin 9010, it would still be a step forward for Huawei, even if it can no longer keep up with the pace of its competitors. We won’t know the real-world consistency of the Kirin 9020’s performance until we see some real benchmarks, but, as always, it’s clear that Huawei is continuing to raise the stakes on its in-house chipset development.

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