Details on the new Kirin 9020 chipset surface, here's what is inside the new Mate 70 series

Huawei unveiled the new Mate 70 series earlier today, but was secretive about what chipsets are used in the new phones. Early speculations pointed to a “Kirin 9100” with ARM Cortex cores, but that doesn’t seem to be the case – though this too is based on unofficial info coming from Weibo.

A photo from one of the new Huawei Mate 70 phones shows that the chipset is called the Kirin 9020. That makes sense for the successor to the Kirin 9010.

The hardware info app describes a 12-core CPU – two prime cores at up to 2.5GHz, six middle cores at up to 2.1GHz and four little cores at up to 1.6GHz. There is a “but” here, as the chipset supports hyperthreading, i.e. two logical cores on one physical core. Except not all cores have hyperthreading (yes, this is getting convoluted).

The Kirin 9010 had a 1+3+4 configuration of physical cores with hyperthreading on the big and mid cores but not the small ones, so the logical CPU cores are 2+6+4. Which is exactly what we’re seeing with the Kirin 9020.

This suggests that the new Kirin chip uses HiSilicon’s Taishan CPU cores for the top two clusters and not ARM cores. That said, the four small cores are likely Cortex-A510 like on previous 9000-series chips.

The GPU is another in-house design, listed as Maleoon 920. It runs at up to 840MHz, which tops the Maleoon 910 (up to 750MHz) on the Kirin 9010. There are no details on the architecture and compute unit count on the new GPU.

According to Huawei’s internal testing, the Kirin 9020 is some 40% faster overall compared to the previous chipset used in the Pura 70 series. However, the vanilla Huawei Mate 70 might be using the 9010 too, while the 9020 chips are reserved for the higher end models: Mate 70 Pro, Pro+ and RS Ultimate. Presumably the Mate X6 also got the new chipset. Again, this is just speculation, Huawei hasn’t revealed any details on the matter officially.