Chipset powering the refreshed Huawei MatePad Pro 11" tablet might not be a mystery after all

The other day we told you that Huawei was planning to refresh its MatePad Pro 11" tablet and while many of the specs from the 2022 model were being kept for the 2024 version, Huawei was limiting the upcoming variant of the slate to Wi-Fi connectivity only. The 2022 model offered a Cellular and Wi-Fi option along with just Wi-Fi. Huawei also planned on using its own Kirin 9000s 5G chipsets for the new tablets compared to the Snapdragon chips used on the older 2022 MatePad Pro 11".

The 7nm Kirin 9000s 5G application processor (AP) was surprisingly found inside the Mate 60 series allowing Huawei to offer 5G natively on a phone for the first time in three years. That's due to U.S. export rules that prevent foundries using American tech to make chips from shipping cutting-edge semiconductors to Huawei. The Kirin 9000s 5G SoC was manufactured by China's largest foundry, SMIC, using the latter's 7nm process node and since they support 5G, the inclusion of the silicon in the Mate 60 series helped set off a wave of nationalism in China.

Now something that occurred to me when I was writing the story about the MatePad Pro 11" (2024) yesterday was, without offering cellular connectivity for the tablet, why would the new version of the MatePad Pro 11" need a Kirin 9000s 5G AP? We might have come across the answer to that question thanks to a Geekbench benchmark test that showed a Huawei product with the model number Huawei XYAO-W00, believed to be the refreshed MatePad Pro tablet, powered by an unnamed and mysterious Kirin chipset.

The chip running the tablet on Geekbench features an octa-core configuration with one Performance CPU core clocked at 2.49GHz, three more Performance CPU cores running at 2.15GHz, and four Efficiency CPU cores clocked at 1.53GHz. That is the exact configuration used for the Kirin 9000s 5G.The Geekbench scores for single-core and multi-core were 1244 and 3793 respectively which matches the score for the Kirin 9000s 5G used on the Mate 60 series, and also the Snapdragon 865 SoC from 2019. Yes, despite the accolades, the Kirin 9000s chip is theoretically four years behind other flagship chips.

Since 5G isn't needed for the new tablet (remember, it doesn't feature cellular connectivity), the Kirin chip that accompanied the MatePad Pro 11" on Geekbench might have been the Kirin 9000s without the 5G support.  We should point out that the Geekbench test showed that the MatePad Pro 11" tablet will sport 12GB of RAM which dovetails perfectly with the specs we told you that the tablet would sport last night.

With everything lining up perfectly, it is clear that the device that was put through the Geekbench test was the Huawei MatePad Pro 11' (2024) powered by a Kirin 9000s SoC without 5G support.