Huawei was placed on the Entity List which prevented it from accessing its U.S. supply chain without obtaining special licenses. Without the ability to work with Google, the company scrambled to complete work on its HarmonyOS which replaced the Google Mobile Services (GMS) version of Android.
And the following year, Huawei was banned from receiving cutting-edge chips made by any foundry that uses U.S. gear to produce the components.
Eventually, Huawei was granted permission to license 4G versions of Qualcomm's chipsets which it used to power the Mate 50 and the P60 flagships. But at the beginning of this year, a tipster on Weibo said that Huawei would surprise everyone by releasing a new phone during the second half of the year that would use a homegrown Kirin chip.
You might not have realized that Huawei has one of the most innovative chip design firms with its HiSilicon unit and at one time Huawei was TSMC's second-largest customer after Apple.
The U.S. bans changed everything so it truly was a surprise (except for that aforementioned tipster) when it was discovered that the new Mate 60 Pro is equipped with a Kirin application processor (AP).
According to Gizmochina, apps that can determine which AP your phone is running show that the Mate 60 Pro features a Kirin 9000s produced by HiSilicon. The chip features a 12-core design.
The configuration of the Kirin 9000s includes: – Two Cortex-A34 low-power efficiency CPU cores. – Six customized Cortex-A78AE CPU cores. – Four Cortex-A510 efficiency CPU cores.
The highest clock speed, according to AnTuTu, is 2.62GHz and the chip features the Maleoon-910 GPU. The AnTuTu benchmark score was 699,783. Huawei remains quiet about the chip but did call the phone the "most powerful Mate model ever"
(why do I hear Jony Ive saying this?). However, compare the score with the 1,556,351 tallied by the Galaxy S23 Ultra using the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy AP.