Huawei reportedly has a Kirin 9000L mobile SoC in the works

Huawei's upcoming flagship P50 smartphone series is rumored to launch in limited batches due to the company's blockade from engaging foundries such as TSMC to manufacture new copies of the Kirin 9000 processor on which the devices are said to be based.

Then again, the OEM may also have designed a new and slightly lower-end variant of this SoC, the 9000E, for the base-model P50. Now, a new leak points to a second and further diminished version called the Kirin 9000L.

According to the prolific Weibo leaker WHYLAB, this new 9000 derivative still has the same CPU core layout as the premium variant (1 "prime" ARM Cortex-A77; 3 additional Cortex-A77s clocked at 2.54GHz and 4 Cortex-A55s at 2.05GHz). However, its prime core is set at a maximum of 2.86GHz, as opposed to 3.13GHz in the 9000 and 9000E. 

Furthermore, the "9000L's" Mali-G78 GPU is slated to have only 18 cores, whereas the 9000 and putative 9000E have 24 and 22 respectively. Finally, this new variant has an NPU with only 1 major core, compared to 2 in the full-fat 9000; furthermore, it even lacks the "mini" core found in the original.

Therefore, WHYLAB now speculates that this upcoming 9000E might be destined for future premium mid-rangers such as successors for the Nova 8 series. On the other hand, for this leak to actually come to fruition, it would apparently require the use of Samsung's 5nm EUV node for its mass-production - something to which this chip-maker may not be amenable.

Buy a Mate 40 Pro unlocked on Amazon