Huawei says more than 100 million devices with its own Kirin chips have shipped since 2023. The company gave the figure to IT Home at its Kirin media briefing in Shanghai on October 13th, where Xu Songyu, head of Huawei’s wireless device chip product management, walked through how the Kirin 9050 series is built.
Huawei designs the Kirin 9050 series in three dimensions from the start, rather than just stacking chips. Each block of logic goes where it fits best, and several dies are designed together as one chip, so signals travel shorter wires.
Chinese news site Jiemian adds the figures from Xu’s talk. Huawei claims a 53.5% jump in transistor density, and in its tests of the Kirin 9050 Pro, run on a Mate 90 Pro Max against a Mate 80 Pro Max, multi-core CPU performance is up 23% and big-core efficiency 41%. In the same tests, the new AI processor is 140% faster and uses 66% less power.
“More than 100 million” is a round number, with no split by model or year, but it’s a big one given the history. A 2020 US rule required a license for any chip made to Huawei’s designs using US chipmaking technology.
Kirin came back in August 2023 with the Mate 60 series. In this year’s third quarter, Huawei’s China phone shipments grew 17.3% from a year earlier, IDC’s figures show, while the market fell 15.4%.
Huawei’s 2027 Kirin chip is already in testing. Xu said in Chinese, in our translation, that the chip is “already in our hands” and that testing is in line with expectations.
