Huawei unveiled its flagship Mate 70 series yesterday, but, as with previous launches, it disclosed little about the phone’s chipset. While early rumors pointed to a “Kirin 9100” with eight ARM Cortex cores, new information from China tells a different story.
Images shared on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, confirm that the Mate 70 series runs on a new “Kirin 9020” chipset. This naming isn’t a complete surprise, as its predecessor, the Kirin 9010, powers the Pura 70 series.
The Kirin 9020 features a 12-core CPU with two prime cores clocked at 2.5GHz, six mid-range cores at 2.1GHz, and four efficiency cores peaking at 1.6GHz. However, this core design could be a result of hyperthreading.
Kirin 9020 supports hyperthreading
Hyperthreading is a technique that allows manufacturers to fit two logical cores per physical core. The Kirin 9010, for instance, had a 1+3+4 physical core layout, but its prime and mid-range cores support hyperthreading. This makes its logical core design 2+6+4. The Kirin 9020 also likely uses the same technique.
If true, the new SoC is using HiSilicon’s in-house Taishan CPU cores for the top two clusters, rather than ARM cores. The four efficiency cores, however, are likely Cortex-A510s, like the previous 9000-series chips.
The graphics processing unit (GPU) also appears to be an in-house design, dubbed the Maleoon 920. This boasts a maximum clock speed of 840MHz, exceeding the 750MHz of the Kirin 9010’s Maleoon 910. Specific details regarding the architecture and compute unit count for the new GPU remain unavailable.
AnTuTu scores for the Mate 70 Pro+ reveal a total of 1,248,520 points. It’s nowhere near what the latest flagship chips from Qualcomm and MediaTek achieve. But it’s a near 30% improvement over the Kirin 9010 found in the Pura 70 series, which scores around 979,511 points on AnTuTu.
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