Huawei announces Mate 60 smartphones with probably its own Kirin SoC with 5G

Huawei has announced the Mate 60 and Mate 60 Pro for China. The Pro version has a larger battery and 3D facial recognition, among other things. Huawei does not want to say anything about the SoC in the phones, but it would be its own Kirin SoC with support for 5G.

Huawei does not want to say anything about the SoC in the smartphones. The AnTuTu benchmark database states that it concerns the 5nm Kirin 9000S. It has 12 cores with a clock speed of up to 2.62GHz. There are six Cortex A78AE cores, four Cortex A510 cores and two Cortex A34 cores. This differs from SoCs from MediaTek and Qualcomm, among others, which do not use A34 cores. The GPU is the Maleoon 910. The performance is said to be around the level of the three-year-old Snapdragon 870 from Qualcomm.

It is unknown how Huawei obtained the SoC. Due to the US trade ban, the manufacturer has officially had no opportunity to have TSMC, Samsung or Intel produce SoCs since 2019. There is no manufacturer in China that has a process advanced enough to make 5nm transistors. Huawei is also not allowed to release equipment with 5G due to the trade ban. That is why it used modified Qualcomm Socs until now, where 5G was deactivated in the modem.

The Mate 60 Pro has three cutouts in the screen for cameras, as can be seen from the listing on Vmall. The first is for the 13-megapixel front camera. There is also one for the ToF sensor for 3D facial recognition. The third hole is probably for the laser for the ToF camera. The regular Mate 60 does not have 3D facial recognition and therefore only has the front camera. can be seen on the product page. The phones are currently only available in China.