Last year, Huawei was faced with an enormous task of finding a replacement for Google Apps. Its solution was to develop Huawei Mobile Services and investing in its AppGallery app store. But next year, Huawei will face an even bigger challenge – chipsets. With TSMC barred from manufacturing chips for Huawei’s chip subsidiary – Hisilicon, the company will be forced to look for alternatives very soon.

According to an industry insider on Weibo, Huawei’s flagship smartphones in 2021 could be powered by a 5nm chip from a third party vendor. The insider didn’t expand on his comment but the most likely contender for Huawei’s chip supply should be none other than MediaTek.

This comment by the insider is a bit confusing especially if you have been reading reports about the 5nm Kirin 1000 or 1020 that’s all set to launch this year. But here, he’s talking about 5nm chips for Huawei’s 2021 flagships and not the upcoming Mate 40.

TSMC Can Still Supply Chips To Huawei Until September 2020

In May 2020, the Trump administration added a new rule which barred overseas companies from supplying components to Huawei if it was made using US technology. Given how US equipment plays an important role in manufacturing semiconductor chips, this technically bars TSMC, SMIC, and even Samsung from manufacturing chips for Huawei. However, the US has granted a grace period of 120-days before the rule takes into effect. So TSMC can continue supplying chips to Hisilicon until September 15, 2020.

There was also a recent report which said that Huawei has placed an urgent order with the TSMC for 5nm chips. This means Huawei’s upcoming Kirin 1000 or 1020 (name is yet to be confirmed) 5nm chipset can still be manufactured by TSMC and released on schedule.

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But What About Huawei’s 2021 flagships?

Unless the US government extends the grace period after September, TSMC, or for that matter even the Chinese SMIC cannot manufacture chips for Hisilicon. This would leave Huawei with very limited options. An alternative could be to procure 5nm chips from a third-party vendor so that Huawei’s flagships next year are competitive, even without its own Hisilicon chips.

Since Qualcomm is a US company, it’s not a viable alternative. This leaves either MediaTek or even Samsung as the potential vendor of next-generation 5nm chips for Huawei.

But it remains to be seen if Samsung or MediaTek can legally sell its own chips to Huawei that’s manufactured using US technology. There are reports which say TSMC and Samsung are looking at setting up production lines without US equipment but we haven’t heard anything concrete yet.

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Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) earlier today announced its quarterly earnings for the first quarter of 2020. The company posted revenue of about 3106 billion Taiwan dollars which is an improvement of 2.1% from last quarter. Compared to the same period last year (Q1 2019), the revenue increased by 42%.

In the first quarter, TSMC’s advanced process contributed a lot to the company’s revenue. The new 7nm process contributed 35% of the Q1 revenue, the 16nm process contributed 19% of the revenue, and the 10nm contributed 0.5% of the Q1 revenue. Overall, the advanced process is said to have contributed 55% of the entire revenue and became an important growth point.

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After the 7nm process, TSMC will also mass-produce the next-generation 5nm process. Previously, mass-production was billed to commence in the first half of this year but due to the COVID 19 pandemic, the mass production has been delayed. Mass production is now expected to commence in the second half of the year. Nevertheless, because TSMC’s 5nm process is the only one in mass production globally, it is expected to account for 10% of its annual revenue.

According to official data, compared to 7nm (first-generation DUV ), the new 5nm chip based on the Cortex A72 core can provide 1.8 times the logic density, 15% faster speed, and 30% lower power consumption. The SRAM process is also very excellent and it has a reduced area.

The 5nm process will be utilised mainly for the Apple A14 and Huawei Hisilicon Kirin 1020 chipsets. The A14 Bionic chipset is said to have a peak frequency of 3.1GHz .

As for the Kirin 1020, the specifications are yet to be confirmed. However, previous rumours tipped the SoC to feature an upgraded Cortex-A77 architecture, but there are also rumours that Huawei will skip the A77 generation and go directly to the future Cortex-A78 architecture, which is an intergenerational upgrade. What can be confirmed at present is that the Kirin 1020 will be featured on the Mate 40 series in the second half of the year.

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(source)

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Huawei is known to launch multiple flagships in a year. These premium grade handsets are also updated annually. The Huawei P40 series has already been launched, and now the anticipation for the Mate 40 series has begun. Although the announcement is still a while away, a renowned analyst, Ming Chi-Kuo, has revealed that the device will feature the HiSilicon Kirin 1020 alongside a new FreeForm lens technology.

According to the international analyst, the Huawei Mate 40 will see the debut of the company’s proprietary chipset, the Kirin 1020. It has been codenamed as Baltimore and will be manufactured on a 5nm process, with improvements across the board regarding the CPU and GPU. Reportedly, the 5nm process will bring 15 percent high performance while reducing power consumption by 30 percent. It is said to be based on the Cortex A77 or even the A78 architecture.

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Another interesting inclusion in the report from Ming Chi-Kuo is the FreeForm lens technology. The new camera technology can potentially reduce distortion in wide angle lenses. Distortion being the fisheye effect or the slight blurring on the edge of a captured image. According to the company behind this technology, “the freeform lenses are optimized only across a cellphone’s rectangular image field rather than the conventional circular image field.”

Furthermore, “the designs enable zero chromatic aberration and zero vignetting.” In other words, a clearer picture with the benefit of optimizations specifically for smartphones and their wide angle lens. Unfortunately, Huawei has yet to confirm any of the reports, but since its from a reliable source, there is a good possibility of the company adding these features.

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Huawei launched the Kirin 990 and Kirin 990 5G processors this year, and they’re quite the impressive chipsets. The latter was the very first 5G equipped SoC on the market, with 10.3 billion transistors and 7nm EUV technology. However, the Kirin 990’s CPU / GPU architecture disappointingly saw no big upgrades, though that will finally change with the upcoming Kirin 1020 SoC.

The latest news shows that the Kirin 1020 processor is code-named “Baltimore”. It’s not surprising, since Huawei’s chips have always been named after cities. We also already know the chipset will be built with TSMC’s 5nm process for better power efficiency and more stable performance. The bigger change comes with the CPU cores however.

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The Kirin 1020 will also use the new Cortex-A78 cores skipping the A77 cores that you can find in other flagship SoCs like the MediaTek 1000 Dimensity. When compared to the Cortex-A76 on the Kirin 990, the the new core architecture will allow the Kirin 1020 to easily gain a 50% performance improvement over its predecessor.

That’s a huge upgrade to what was already a fairly speedy SoC. On top of that, it gives Huawei the upper hand against other competitors like the aforementioned MediaTek, who are still relying on Cortex-A77 cores for performance. Nothing has been leaked regarding the GPU, but we’re hoping we can expect similarly big upgrade.

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(Source)

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Qualcomm announced the next-gen Snapdragon 865 chipset a few days back alongside the Snapdragon 765/765G premium midrange chipsets. The new chipsets are not expected to feature on any smartphone until next year. Even at that, they are the trending topic when it comes to smartphone processors but Huawei may soon alter that with its next-gen Systems-on-Chip (SoC).

A leak has emerged on Twitter which tips that the next-generation Kirin flagship SoC will go by the name Kirin 1020. Huawei is also rumoured as planning to launch a Kirin 820 processor to replace the current crop of mid-range chipsets (Kirin 810).

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The tipster didn’t disclose any clue as to the specifications of the chipsets and that information isn’t in the public domain just yet. However, it is safe to speculate that the chipset will be integrated with a 5G modem. The tipster did disclose that the flagship Kirin 1020 will be produced on a 5nm process and integrate ARM Cortex-A77 CPU architecture. It will bring nearly 50% increase in performance over the Kirin 990. The chipset won’t have a 4G version like the present Kirin 990.

Kirin1020 v Kirin990 5G
Nearly 50% performance increase
5 nm v 7nm EVU
ARM A77 v A76
5G only.

Kirin 820 replace current 810 and include build in 5G modem first device will be Nova 7 or 10X#Huawei

— Teme (特米) (@RODENT950) December 6, 2019

The tipster also revealed that Huawei will continue with this year’s product update by launching the flagship Kirin 1020 first onboard the Mate 40 series in the second half of 2020. Next year’s P40 series will feature the Kirin 990 5G chipset. As fr the Kirin 820, it will also have an integrated 5G modem and may feature on the Nova 7 or Honor 10X.

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Huawei, which is among the leading smartphone manufacturers in the world, is reportedly working on a new chipset named Kirin 1020, which is expected to twice as powerful as the company’s current flagship chipset Kirin 970.

The Chinese smartphone manufacturer has been using its own in-house developed mobile chips on a majority of its smartphones, as well as for smartphones under its sub-brand Honor. There are many benefits to this practice, including low costs, differentiating factor compared to others, and less dependency on third-parties, among others.

If the latest reports are to be believed, then the China-based company is working on a new flagship chipset by the name Kirin 1020. The report coming from China claims that the performance of Kirin 1020 will be double compared to Kirin 970.

But, no details related to the said chipset is available at this time. Sources say that the Kirin 1020 chipset will go into mass production once the first 5G network launches, and will soon after be used in the company’s smartphones.

The HiSilicon Kirin 970 is the company’s current top-end mobile chipset, which was the first mobile chipset in the world to have AI chip on board. It is an 8-core CPU with a clock speed of up to 2.4GHz i.e. 4 x Cortex A73 at 2.4GHz + 4 x Cortex 53 at 1.8GHz. It has a 12-core Mali G72MP12 GPU that provides a 20% performance increase over the previous generation as well as a 50% increase in efficiency.

However, the performance on the Kirin 970 is not on-par with that of Snapdragon 845 from Qualcomm, which is currently dominating the mobile chipset market. But HiSilicon’s upcoming Kirin 980 chipset is expected to have better performance than Qualcomm‘s flagship chipset as it will be manufactured using 7nm design process by TSMC.

Qualcomm has been dominating the mobile chipset market and has little to no competition in the high-end space. However, that could soon change as the companies like Huawei and Samsung are working to come up with powerful chips.

Last month, Samsung said that it was in talks with several Chinese manufacturers, including ZTE, to provide its own Exynos mobile chipsets. The company has been using Exynos mobile chipsets for its own flagship smartphones under its Galaxy lineup. As for the external customers of its mobile chipsets, it has only one client — Meizu.

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On the other hand, a couple of months ago, Huawei said that it is not positioning its chipset business as an independent business and does not aim to generate income by selling it to other manufacturers.

(Via)

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