Huawei Kirin 9100 is said to be mass-produced using improved photolithography technology, but will not use a 5-nanometer process

It is rumored that Huawei will launch the Mate70 series of mobile phones this month and may be equipped with a new chip called Kirin 9100 in the new product series. Although the former Chinese giant and its current foundry partner SMIC have successfully developed a 5-nanometer process, the new chips will not use this technology for mass production. But it also won't rely on the older 7nm process like the Kirin 9000S, as the latest specs show the CPU cluster, GPU and lithography technology used.

At this stage, Huawei has no choice but to continue working with SMIC, as current US trade sanctions prevent Huawei from working with TSMC or Samsung. It is very likely that the two Chinese companies will cooperate behind closed doors to develop the 6nm process, as an X user named @TechHome100 revealed that the Kirin 9100 will use the 6nm process.

As for whether "6nm" is a marketing term or an actual improvement of SMIC's 7nm process, we can't confirm, but we have previously reported that the Kirin 9100 may use the "N+3" node, which is a more refined variant of N+2 and has a higher density than the Kirin 9010.

In short, the 7nm node may not be available, so a 6nm version means SMIC has found a way to increase transistor density using existing DUV equipment. As for the Kirin 9100's CPU cluster, the SoC may not use Huawei's customized TaiShan core, but a single-core Cortex-X1 clocked at 2.67GHz. There are also three Cortex-A78 cores clocked at 2.32GHz and four Cortex-A55 high-efficiency cores clocked at 2.02GHz. From this point of view, Huawei may have given up on customizing the core and switched to ARM's design.

As for the GPU, the Kirin 9100 will use the Maleoon 910 from last year’s Kirin 9000S. There's no mention of core count here, but considering the Kirin 9000S comes with four cores, Huawei may increase the core count to provide some differentiation between the two generations. In terms of performance, the Kirin 9100 will undoubtedly be slower than the competition, but as long as it's faster than its predecessor, that's what really matters.