Huawei’s Kirin 9010 can’t compete with Snapdragon flagships, but that’s fine

As many of you know by now, some of Huawei’s new Pura 70 smartphones are fueled by a new chip, the Kirin 9010. The Huawei Pura 70 Ultra flagship is one of them. Reports have been coming in regarding the Kirin 9010, and as we thought, the chip can’t compete with Snapdragon flagships.

The Huawei Kirin 9010 can’t compete with Snapdragon flagships, but that is to be expected

That’s perfectly fine, though. Why? Well, because this is just a more powerful version of the Kirin 9000S, which was trailing behind. Both of them are 7nm processors, though the Kirin 9010 comes with more cores and an upgraded GPU.

Considering that Huawei got banned by the US in a number of ways, it’s actually impressive that Huawei managed to release these two chips in collaboration with SMIC. In fact, a 5nm chip is expected later this year.

A freelance coder shared some information via X. He ran the Kirin 9010 SoC over benchmark test AndSPECMod. That test showed that the Kirin 9010 consumes more energy than the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC. It also delivers lower performance scores than that chip.

The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 seems to offer better performance

The Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, as a reminder, was announced in May 2022. It did prove to be a very compelling SoC, and it still works really well in smartphones that it’s included in.

This performance gap was expected, however. SMIC was unable to obtain the advanced EUV lithography machines in order to make something more compelling. SMIC does own deep ultraviolet lithography machines, but they can’t create anything more advanced than 5nm chips with them.

Huawei did file a rather interesting patent for a low-tech lithography system a while back. That could help SMIC provide a 5nm chip for Huawei later this year, as reports are suggesting.

In any case, the Kirin 9000S seemed to do a wonderful job of powering the Huawei Mate 60 series of phones. The Kirin 9010 is even more powerful, and we’re expecting that there won’t be issues with the Huawei Pura 70 Pro and Ultra.

We’ll have to wait in order to test them, however. The Huawei Pura 70 series will likely arrive to global markets, but we still don’t know when exactly will that happen.