Huawei Mate 60 Pro Plus tipped to launch with quad punch-hole display and 12-thread SoC

The 60 and 60 Pro currently remain the only 2 new Mate-series smartphones up for pre-order exclusively through Huawei's Chinese sales channels without a sign of the usual E or RS variants - for now. The OEM is in fact now slated to resurrect the Pro+ variant from 2020 to augment the new line-up soon.

This "60 Pro+" is thought to adopt the new and more distinctive 60-series design, albeit possibly in a new "panda" finish and with even more cameras than the Pro. It might have as many as 5 shooters in its new Star Ring camera hump, plus at least 1 more selfie camera as it elaborates on the Pro's new triple punch-hole with the top-end quad alternative.

Should the 60 Pro+ really launch soon, it is more certain that Huawei will, again, gloss over its SoC details in its promotional material. Nevertheless, a new WekiHome Mate 60 Pro teardown seems to confirm that the series does indeed rock the first HiSilicon chipset in generations.

The "Kirin 9000S" is reportedly sourced from SMIC's 7 nanometer (nm) N+2 node, and, according to the (possibly ill-translated, yet still unreassuringly, titled) "Unreliable LAB" Weibo account, of a traditional 8-core composition with a by-now standard 1+3+4 cluster layout.

A Geekbench 5 analysis has alleged yielded underwhelming top clocks of 2.26GHz, 2.15GHz and 1.53GHz respectively for those groups. Then again, Unreliable LAB points out that the supposed 9000S' threads ("CPU 0-11") add up to 12, as the 4 slowest "small" cores are single-threaded while the remaining faster ones have 2 apiece.

Regardless, each thread is credited with the ability to reach its respective core's top speed, although it seems Geekbench can only fully assess 7 of them. Accordingly, while Huawei might indeed be back to making its own flagship chips again, it apparently now lags multiple generational upgrades behind rivals such as Qualcomm and MediaTek in any case.

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