U.S. lawmakers will be pissed if this rumor about the Huawei Kirin 9100 AP comes true
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Huawei will be introducing its second flagship line of the year late in the fourth quarter. The manufacturer has long released two flagship series each year with the photography-based P-series (now known as the Pura line) typically seen in Q1, and the innovative Mate series hitting the marketplace in Q4. After stunning the smartphone world last year by packing the Mate 60 line with its first homegrown 5G supporting Kirin chip in three years (the Mate 40 line was the last Huawei phone powered by a 5G Kirin chip), U.S. lawmakers threw a fit.
After all, the U.S. Commerce Department changed U.S. export rules in 2020 to prevent foundries using American technology to manufacture chips from shipping any cutting-edge (read 5G) chips to Huawei. As a result, the P50, Mate 50, and P60 flagship lines used Snapdragon chips that Qualcomm was able to ship to Huawei thanks to a license obtained from the Commerce Department. But these chips were tweaked so that they couldn't support 5G.
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The Kirin 9000s chipsets used to power the Mate 60 series were produced by China's largest foundry, SMIC, which is also the third largest foundry in the world. Because U.S. and Dutch officials block shipments of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines to China, SMIC had to use the previous generation deep ultraviolet lithography (DUV) machines to etch circuitry patterns on the silicon wafers that become chips.
The last 5nm chip designed by Huawei was the Kirin 9000 5G from 2020. | Image credit-Huawei
But there have been rumors that the Mate 70 series that Huawei will announce in Q4 will be built using a 5nm process node employing a DUV and multiple patterning. If SMIC can pull this off, it will absolutely infuriate U.S. lawmakers who have been trying to keep both SMIC and Huawei away from designing and building advanced chipsets.
Huawei is considered a threat to U.S. national security which explains why American lawmakers have been so desperate to place sanctions on the company and its suppliers. There is still a good chance that SMIC will have to stick with the 7nm node it used to make the Kirin 9000s.
The big question is whether SMIC can produce 5nm chipsets with a high enough yield to make it feasible. Huawei's AP will still be trailing the 3nm processors used by Apple, Samsung, vivo, and Oppo those four phone manufacturers will have flagship handsets powered by 3nm chips by the first quarter of 2025.
A post on the Chinese social media platform Weibo says that the Kirin 9100 will cost Huawei $157-$186 to buy which would be in the same range as MediaTek's Dimensity 9400 ($155) and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 ($190-$240). You might consider the Kirin 9100 to be pricey at that range considering that the Dimensity 9400 and the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 will both be built using TSMC's second-generation 3nm node, and the Kirin 9100 might be built using a 5nm-7nm node. Lastly, the Kirin 9100 just managed to beat the two-generation old Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in a benchmark test.
Still, Huawei is making enough progress along with SMIC that we wouldn't be surprised to see a 5nm chip under the hood of the Mate 70 series later this year. If this occurs, you can imagine what the reaction will be in Washington D.C.
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