Tipster says 7nm Kirin 9000s made by SMIC is really 5nm Kirin 9000 from 2020 built by TSMC

The mystery behind the Kirin 9000s chipset used to power the Huawei Mate 60 Pro might have been solved by X tipster @RGcloudS. To refresh your memory, when Huawei introduced the Mate 60 Pro by surprise at the end of August, everyone was stunned when a teardown revealed that the phone was powered by a Huawei-designed Kirin 9000s chipset built by China's largest foundry, SMIC, using its 7nm node. U.S. lawmakers and officials called for tighter sanctions against Huawei.

In 2020, the U.S. expanded its export rules to prevent foundries using U.S. technology to make chips, from shipping cutting-edge silicon to Huawei without a license. The last two flagship series that Huawei offered before the Mate 60 Pro, the Mate 50, and the P60 lines, were powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 chipset tweaked to work on 4G signals. In other words, the only way to connect to a 5G signal with those phones was to buy a special third-party case.

But the Mate 60 Pro offers 5G connectivity as a native feature for the first time since 2020 thanks to the Kirin 9000s chip. Analysts have been wondering how Huawei could work around the sanctions and how SMIC could produce such a chip without access to an extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machine. This machine etches extremely thin circuitry patterns on silicon wafers to allow for the placement of billions of transistors. The only company that makes the EUV machine, ASML, is a Dutch firm that has blocked shipments of any of its products to China. 

Truth time ️

Deep stalking kernel level

Does SMIC really made kirin ?
Does 7nm actually possible with legacy DUV machine ?
Who made Huawei Kirin 9000s ?

Why there's a lot of weird information, like in Image #1 , Kirin 9000s classified as 5nm

Image #2, known information of… pic.twitter.com/fCptqjgw0d

— RGcloudS (@RGcloudS) October 10, 2023

The X tipster, on his tweet, showed a screenshot that lists the Kirin 9000s as a 5nm chip. One of the pictures from the Mate 60 Pro teardown showed the Kirin 9000s had a date stamp of 2035 which means that this specific chip was made in the 35th week of 2020 or during August 24th-August 30th 2020. So in other words, @RGcloudS believes that the Kirin 9000s is a rebranded 5nm Kirin 9000. As the tipster writes, "Kirin 9000s is actually Kirin 9000 made by TSMC 3 years ago not SMIC." The Kirin 9000 was the first 5nm chip made for a smartphone when it was launched in 2020.

Using some back-of-the-envelope math, @RGcloudS figures that Huawei could have socked away 142 million Kirin 9000E and Kirin 9000 5G chipsets in a three-month period. He adds that there is no way Huawei can target sales of 40 million units of the Mate 60 Pro line if it was counting on production from SMIC's N+2 7nm process node which had a yield under 20%. He also adds, "It doesn't matter how talented you are, you can't produce 7nm with legacy 1980 DUV machine, multiple steps of stacking to create compared to EUV."

Keep in mind that this is just one person's opinion of what happened. Also file away in the back of your mind that the Kirin 9000 from 2020 contained 15.3 billion transistors, very close to the 16 billion inside the A16 Bionic but 24.2% shy of the 19 billion inside the A17 Pro.