Huawei has recently officially denied that it will be bringing back its proprietary HiSilicon Kirin series of chipsets for its next gen flagship P60 lineup of smartphones. So here are all the details.

For those unaware, the Chinese tech giant lost access to all US based technology after the US government put it on the trade blacklist, or the Entity List. A year after this, the company was also cut off from its primary chip supplier TSMC. This meant that it could no longer place orders for its proprietary chipset technology for its HiSilicon fabless semiconductor subsidiary. But since then, it shifted to using Qualcomm chipsets like the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoCs, however, these only supported 4G networking and were not 5G enabled.

But recently, rumors surfaced that the brand might be planning on bringing its Kiring chips back in 2023, for its flagship Huawei P60 series. The news arrives from a statement that the company shared on its official Weibo account (a Chinese microblogging website). Here, the brand denies rumors of releasing a new Kirin chipset powered smartphone next year. THe original rumor surfaced earlier this year and claimed that the new P60 models will feature Kirin processors, which were reportedly based on the 14nm process.

Furthermore, it was rumored that China’s largest foundry, SMIC, will be the one manufacturing the chips. In other words, we can expect the flagship P60 series of smartphone to possibly be powered by high end Qualcomm chipsets like the supposed Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC. Keep in mind that this is still unconfirmed at the moment, so take this news with a pinch of salt.

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As one of the world’s largest smartphone markets, China with its population of over 1 billion reflects several of the future trends that we may see in the smartphone industry, with one of them being the brand of the SoC (System on a Chip) used in our smartphones.

As we are almost halfway into 2022, data analytics firm, CINNO Research, has recently published a report on the Top 5 Smartphone SoC Vendors in the China market for Q1 2022, and it seems that MediaTek is the popular SoC brand used in smartphones for the quarter.

According to the report (via ITHome), smartphone SoC shipments in Q1 2022 were 74.39 million units, down 14.4% year-on-year, and down 0.7% quarter-on-quarter. And the top 5 vendors for the smartphone SoC vendors are MediaTek in the first place, Qualcomm in second, Apple in third, with Huawei’s HiSilicon and UNISOC in fourth and fifth respectively.

Let’s start from top to bottom, MediaTek saw 30.7 million smartphone chipsets shipped out in Q1 2022, which was higher than its 25 million shipments from last quarter, and 30.1 million shipments from Q1 2022. The rise in smartphone SoC shipments MediaTek can be mainly attributed to the semiconductor firm’s strategy and chipset catalogue that it had offered in the last 6 months, which included the brand’s popular Dimensity 920 5G chipset found on the Redmi Note 11 Pro+, Realme 9 Pro+ and Xiaomi 11i Hypercharge.

For Qualcomm, the brand remained relatively stable at second with 26.7 million smartphone SoC shipments in Q1 2022, higher than the 23.6 million figure from last quarter, but lower than the 27.9 million shipments from Q1 of last year. Coupled with the ongoing chip shortage, Qualcomm had earlier announced that it will gradually shift its focus to flagship chipsets instead of entry-level and mid-range chipsets due to flagship chipsets providing higher profit margins. However, the one caveat of this strategy is losing market share in mid-range and entry-level markets, which leads to lower shipments overall but higher revenues for the company.

Apple on the other hand, had only shipped 12 million smartphone SoCs in Q1 2022, down 15.8% from its 18.4 million figure from Q4 2021. As the iPhone nears the end of its release cycle, shipments are also expected to go down as well, because consumers are already expecting a new iPhone release soon, and therefore would hold off buying the current model and wait for the next iteration instead.

Huawei’s HiSilicon continues its gradual exit from the China smartphone SoC market as the firm had only shipped out 2.5 million units this quarter, down from 13.8 million in Q1 2021. As stocks for HiSilicon Kirin are not replenished due to the still ongoing supply sanctions against the company, the brand is expected to drop out of the top 5 as late as next year or as soon as the next quarter.

Squeezing just into the Top 5 is the rapidly growing UNISOC semiconductor company. UNISOC saw shipments of 1.9 million smartphones SoCs in Q1 2022, up 1760% from 0.1 million in Q1 2021. The main cause for the exponential growth behind UNISOC is the entry-level smartphone market. As the bigger players like Qualcomm and Apple’s main focus area is in the high-end, UNISOC aims to tackle the low end with its relatively much more affordable chipsets sold off to Realme, Motorola and Samsung to sell in their sub 100 dollar device market.

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(Via)

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Earlier it was announced that MediaTek had already led the Android smartphone SoC market in 2021 with a 46% share, exceeding its rival Qualcomm, which had a 35% share in the market in 2021. One might think this spell the end of Qualcomm’s dominance in the Android smartphone space. 

However, a follow-up report to the research has been published by Counterpoint Research. The report details the price brackets where Qualcomm, MediaTek, Exynos, HiSilicon and UNISOC are leading in the race for the Android chip supplier with the largest market share.

A closer examination of the report reveals that most of the market share growth for MediaTek in 2021 came from the low-mid tier wholesale price segment (sub-$299), driven by strong demand for the Dimensity 700, 800 and Helio series chipsets. Qualcomm on the other hand dominated the mid-range and premium flagship market with around 50% market share across all price brackets above $300, except for the $700-$799 price bracket, in which Samsung had a lead with 46% market share in the bracket.

But the question remains, why has Qualcomm shifted away from the low-end markets and how did MediaTek manage to win the low-end market after Qualcomm’s gradual exit?

The report mentions that the reason behind these changes of trends in the market is because of the global chip shortage. With Qualcomm unable to secure its chip supply from both TSMC and Samsung, the company instead prioritized focus on ramping up supply for its 700 and 800 series Snapdragon chipsets, driving higher revenue and profitability. 

However, with Qualcomm not providing much value-to-money in its 400 and 600 series Snapdragon chipsets in 2021, phone manufacturers decided to switch over to its competitor, MediaTek instead for their lower-end budget devices. MediaTek managed to put out capable and affordable 5G chipsets to the market in 2021 with their Dimensity 700 to 1200 series, which could provide performance on par and sometimes exceed competing processors in the same price bracket. And with the reveal of its Dimensity 8000 and 9000 series chipsets in 2022, it is expected that MediaTek could take the stake of the higher-end premium Android market as well in this coming year.

The report also shares some details about Samsung’s Exynos, Huawei’s HiSilicon Kirin and UNISOC chipsets in the industry in 2021. Besides the Samsung Galaxy S21 series equipped with Exynos, most of Samsung’s A, M and F series of smartphones were not equipped with Exynos. In the low-mid segment ($100-$299), its share decreased from 17% to 7%, and in the mid-high segment, its share decreased from 13% in 2020 to 6% in 2021.

UNISOC showed exciting growth in 2021 in smartphones priced less than $200. In 2020, UNISOC chipsets only catered to phones priced under $100. However, in 2021, realme, Motorola and Samsung have launched phones with the Tiger series SoC, citing better performance in the chipsets compared to its similarly priced competitors in the market.

Last but not least, HiSilicon’s SoCs had a 16% share in phones costing $500 and above in 2021, which was a decline from the 30% share in the previous year, due to the US trade ban. It is running on the inventory it added before the ban. By the end of 2022, HiSilicon’s market share is expected to continue to drop as its inventory gets depleted. Huawei has already started using Qualcomm SoCs in its new launches, but they are limited to 4G.

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(Via)

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Prior to 2019, there were 4 major SoC brands that you could find in an Android smartphone. They were respectively the Snapdragon series of chips from Qualcomm, the Helio and Dimensity series from MediaTek, the Exynos series from Samsung, and the HiSilicon Kirin series from Huawei. 

Huawei HiSilicon chips were class-leading at the time, especially the HiSilicon Kirin 980 found in the 2018 Huawei Mate 20 Pro, which outperformed every 2018 Flagship sporting the Snapdragon 845 at the time. The HiSilicon chip also enabled 40W wired fast charging to the phone as well as an ISP that could enable night mode that many reviewers considered outcompeted many flagship camera smartphones released in 2018.

However, after the US sanctions imposed in recent years, Huawei was blocked access to its chip manufacturing partner TSMC, and it could only use its remaining stock of Kirin chips and opt for inferior 4G Snapdragon chips for its smartphones, i.e. Huawei P50 Pocket, as the ban affected Huawei to purchase 5G Snapdragon chips as well. 

Well in 2022, after 2 years, Huawei brought great news that it will be bringing back its HiSilicon chips after its 2-year hiatus. In its official poster, Huawei claims it will be moving forward in the chip market once again in 2022, and for fans to stay tuned to the release. 

Not long after the announcement, rumors were already spreading, specifically in the Bilibili forum, that Huawei’s next HiSilicon chip would be called the HiSilicon Skylight 800. 

However, Huawei was quick to respond, and under the forum post, they commented that the rumour was false news. 

Huawei will be launching a new HiSilicon chip again in 2022 and whether it will still bear the Kirin name or another fancy new one like “Skylight” still remains to be seen.

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(Source, Via)

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According to a report from Taiwan, Huawei has contributed 36.1 billion Yuan (roughly 5 billion US Dollars) in revenue to TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), the world’s largest contract chipmaker. This marked a massive jump of 80 percent year on year, with the OEMs share in TSMC’s total revenue growing from 8 percent to 14 percent.

While Huawei saw a major rise in TSMC’s revenue, the Chinese tech giant is still second in this regard to the Cupertino based electronics makers, Apple. The latter has contributed a massive 58.3 billion Yuan (roughly 8.2 billion US Dollars) to TSMC in 2019 and accounts for nearly 23 percent in total revenue to TSMC, up by 1 percent over 2018.

Editor’s Pick: Huawei spent more than 18 Billion on U.S. parts last year and are not looking to replace them: Ren Zhengfei

The primary reasons for Huawei’s significant stems from an increase in demand and expansion of its supply whilst also raising inventory with fears from pressures from the US Government. For those unaware, the US had planned on dealing a devastating blow to Huawei by pressuring TSMC to limit the supply of its HiSilicon Kirin chipset. This has caused the company to raise inventor stockpiles at the moment.

Notably, TSMC’s global market share in the semiconductor field has now reached 52 percent. The company has both 7nm and 5nm processes actively seeing use in mass production for new generation chipset, while it is currently developing and on track with the deployment of 3nm process. Even the 2nm process research has reportedly begun.

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(Via)

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Huawei P9 was announced a couple of days back and the phone came with impressive specs. Apart from the dual camera setup on the back, we were also interested to see the performance of the Kirin 955 chipset that powers the device. It is reportedly a slightly upgraded version of the Kirin 950 that powers the company’s other smartphones like the Mate 8. And now, we have the initial benchmark results of the chipset.

To recap, the Kirin 955 comes with 4 x Cortex A72 clocked at 2.5GHz and 4 x Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz. As for GPU, there will be Mali-T880. In comparison, the Kirin 950 is clocked only at 2.3GHz. So, let’s see the Kirin  955 benchmark performance below.

For now, we only have the Geekbench results, courtesy of IT168. In the single-core Geekbench test, the Kirin 955 managed to score 1809 which is quite good. However, it’s not at par with Snapdragon 820 or even Exynos 8890 that scores 2353 and 2139 respectively. However, this score does manage to beat the deca-core Helio X20 in the same test which scores 1790. The difference is just marginal of only about 20 points.

Coming to the multi-core test, Huawei’s Kirin 955 really shines with a score of 6415 points. Only the Exynos 8890 scores above Kirin 955 with a score of 7497. Snapdragon 820 is behind with 5466 followed by the Helio X20 which scores only 4483 even with its deca-core setup.

Moving on to the GPU performance, as expected, they are not really at par with chips from Samsung and Qualcomm. Huawei’s Kirin 955 only managed 23.2 Fps on the Unified Cross-Platform 3D Graphics benchmark (T-Rex Offscreen), whereas Helio X20 got a marginally better 24.8 Fps. Snapdragon 810 gets around 46.8 Fps which is pretty good, but what’s really amazing is that both Exynos 8890 and SD820 get above 80 Fps. So, GPU is one area where both Kirin 955 and Helio X20 have to work on.

So, that was the first Kirin 955 benchmark results we have seen. What do you think? Good enough for a flagship?

(Source)

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