Despite U.S. ban, Huawei is reportedly about to bring back its Kirin chipsets for smartphones

Before the U.S. made it a point to cripple Huawei, the Chinese manufacturer's HiSilicon unit helped the firm design its own Kirin chips which were produced by TSMC. Huawei was TSMC's second largest customer after Apple until the U.S. Commerce Department changed a rule in 2020. This revision prevents Huawei from buying chips from foundries that use U.S. technology to manufacture them. Huawei has received permission to buy Snapdragon chips that are tweaked so as not to work with 5G signals.

The last Kirin chip produced by Huawei was the Kirin 9000, the first 5nm chip with a built-in 5G modem. An X post from @Tech_Reve (via NotebookCheck.net) shows a pair of configurations for an upcoming Kirin chip. The first configuration shows a chip made up of two Cortex-X3 prime CPU cores, two Cortex-A715 performance CPU cores, and four efficiency Cortex-A510 CPU cores. This configuration includes an Arm Immortalis-G715 MC16 GPU.

A second configuration shared by the Weibo tipster features two Cortex-X1 prime CPU cores, three Cortex-A78 performance CPU cores, and three Cortex-A55 efficiency cores. The GPU on this chip would be the Arm Mali G710 MC10/6.

There is the possibility that these are configurations from two separate chips. Another Weibo post suggests that there will be three new Huawei-designed chips, the Kirin 720, Kirin 830, and the Kirin 9100. The first two are rumored to be coming later this year while the Kirin 9100 could be the chipset powering the P70 flagship expected early next year.

You're probably wondering how Huawei will be able to get around the U.S. restrictions to have the new Kirin chips manufactured. Tipster @tech_reve posted on X that China's leading foundry, SMIC, will build the chip using its N+2 (7nm) node. Another possibility is that Huawei will stack two 14nm chips to deliver 7nm performance using power consumption low enough to run a smartphone without draining the battery or causing too much heat.

Huawei previously denied back in 2022 that the Kirin chips would be back in time for the P60 series (and that turned out to be true). That denial came after the rumor mill incorrectly proposed that a 14nm Kirin 9100 chipset would be powering the 2023 photography-based flagship.