Huawei's Kirin chipsets have long been shrouded in secrecy, particularly those awaiting official announcement. Recently, a leak from a reliable source on Weibo has provided insights into the upcoming Kirin 8030.
This mid-range chipset is expected to power future Huawei nova and Enjoy smartphones. For instance, the newly released nova 15 utilizes the Kirin 8020, which was also featured in the nova 14 Pro and nova 14 Ultra.
The Huawei nova 15 uses the Kirin 8020The Kirin 8030 is reported to be manufactured using SMIC’s N+2 process, a 7nm FinFET node. Although this technology lags behind the industry’s leading-edge capabilities, it's essential to recognize that SMIC and Huawei are effectively reinventing the semiconductor landscape.
Despite the age of the node, Huawei has achieved notable improvements in clock speeds. The Kirin 8030's CPU will feature in-house Taishan cores composed of 1 super large core clocked at 2.8-3.0GHz, 3 medium cores at 2.4-2.6GHz, and 4 small cores at 1.8-2.0GHz.
For comparison, the Kirin 8020's CPU comprises 1 super large core at 2.28GHz, 3 medium cores at 2.05GHz, and 4 small cores at a mere 1.3GHz.
While the capabilities of a larger node are somewhat limited, the Kirin 8030 is said to match the single-core performance of the Snapdragon 888 and surpass it in multi-core performance. It's worth noting that the primary concern with the Snapdragon 888 was its power consumption rather than its performance, and the 888 was manufactured on a 5nm Samsung process.
The new chipset is likely to incorporate a Maleoon GPU, aiming for 100-120fps in select gaming scenarios, though specifics on which games remain unclear.
As a newly designed chipset, the Kirin 8030 will benefit from several advancements, including Huawei’s Barong 5G modem that supports sub-6GHz and mmWave frequencies, alongside a robust Leonardo da Vinci NPU, which reportedly performs more closely to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 than the 888.
At the end of last year, SMIC announced that it had commenced volume production of its N+3 node (5nm) without utilizing EUV technology. For context, the transition from DUV to EUV for Samsung and TSMC began in late 2018/early 2019 at the 7nm stage, but they had access to ASML machinery. The flagship Kirin 9030 is based on the N+3 node.
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