Huawei's latest Kirin 9010 adds a slew of improvements like a 12-core CPU compared to the Kirin 9000S, but these upgrades don't necessarily mean that the chipset is faster or more power-efficient than other competitors. According to a series of tests, the company's latest SoC performs 30% lower than Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 released in 2022, but consumes the same amount of power. Let's take a closer look at these results.
Here's an AndSPECMod benchmark that @negativeonehero ran to test the Kirin 9010, and the results show that one of the performance cores consumes the same power as the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1's Cortex-X2, but at a significantly slower speed.
The reviewer also compared Huawei's latest SoC to the Cortex-A77 of the Snapdragon 870 released 6 years ago, with the Kirin 9010 consuming 50% more power than the Snapdragon 870, but he didn't highlight the performance difference between the two. These tests show that Huawei is once again lagging behind its competitors, with the chip's performance likely to be similar to Google's Tensor series of chips, which are found on various Pixel brand phones.
The U.S. refuses to allow the once world's top smartphone brand to use advanced technologies such as TSMC's 3nm "N3E" process, or to make its own chips using state-of-the-art EUV lithography machines, forcing Huawei to work with local foundry partner SMIC, which helps mass-produce the Kirin 9010. Qualcomm uses TSMC's 4nm node on the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, so it's no surprise that the SoC's "performance per watt" metric outperforms the Kirin 9010.
While the details of the Kirin 9010's process are unclear, Huawei appears to be using SMIC's 7nm process, which is the same technology used in the Kirin 9000S, which explains why the power consumption of its performance cores is the same as that of the Cortex-X2. This could also explain why Huawei has added a larger battery to the Pura 70 series, with even the base version coming with a 4900mAh battery. Hopefully, with the release of the Mate 70 series this October, we'll see the debut of Huawei's 5nm Kirin chipset, which will help close the gap in terms of performance and power consumption.