Earlier last month, Honor launched the Honor Play 4T in China. The handset comes powered by new Kirin 710A SoC. This chip is manufactured by SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation) and not TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) like most chips designed by HiSilicon. To celebrate this partnership as well as SMIC’s 20th anniversary, employees of SMIC received a special edition of Honor Play 4T.
The Honor Play 4T Special Edition has the exact same specifications as the standard retail unit. But additionally, it features SMIC’s 20th anniversary logo on the back with ‘Powered by SMIC FinFET’ text below it. This version of the handset has been gifted to all the employees of SMIC in Shanghai. There’s a less chance of this variant to be made available for regular customers.
Anyway, the partnership is more important to both the firms that the special edition Honor Play 4T. Until now, the Kirin 710 series (Kirin 710, Kirin 710F) was manufactured by TSMC using its 12nm FinFET process technology. But the newly released Kirin 710A uses 14nm FinFET process technology by SMIC. The new variant also slightly differs in the clock speeds but the CPU cores are similar.
One would be wondering why celebrate in manufacturing a inferior chip. The answer to this is all the IP (Intellectual Property) used in designing and producing this chipset is said to be 100% Chinese. Thus, paving a way for Huawei to minimize its dependence on other foreign companies.
That doesn’t mean the Chinese telecom giant will drop partnership with TSMC anytime soon. The Taiwanese chipmaker is the market leader with the best technology. It will be manufacturing HiSilcon Kirin 1000 SoC using 5nm process to power phones like Huawei Mate 40 series later this year.
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(Via)
