Huawei's Kirin 1000 SoC expected to make the jump to 5 nm with next year's Mate 40

With the introduction of the Kirin 990 SoC, Huawei managed to finally come up with a true competitor for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon solution. The AnTuTu benchmarks spotted a few weeks ago showed that the non-5G 7 nm version of the Kirin 990 is lagging just a bit behind the Snapdragon 855+, so we could actually see the slightly faster 5G 7 nm EUV Kirin 990 topping the charts later this month when the Mate 30 Pro 5G version ism scheduled to launch. Still, Huawei is probably not going to rest on its laurels, especially now that it finally made it to the big leagues. Word on the street is that the Chinese company is already working on a next gen SoC to keep pressuring Qualcomm and Samsung.

According to Huawei Central, industry insiders report that the upcoming Kirin 1000 S0C is scheduled to make the jump to 5 nm and will be manufactured by TSMC, which is expected to begin 5 nm mass production in early Q2 2020. The finer manufacturing process will allow the next gen SoCs to integrate even more transistors while keeping the power requirements in check. Huawei confirmed it will also utilize ARM’s new Cortex-A77 cores that should provide a 20% performance boost with no power consumption increase. Since AI-driven applications are starting to see quite the adoption these days, the additional transistors will most likely be put to good use in a more powerful neural processor that will expand the imaging and security features.

Of course, Huawei is not the only company planning to release a 5 nm SoC next year. We already know that Qualcomm also booked TSMC’s 5 nm nodes for an upcoming Snapdragon 865 SoC, while Apple should have a 5 nm A14 Bionic SoC ready by the end of 2020. Samsung is also expected to launch an improved Exynos manufactured on its own 5 nm EUV nodes. Huawei really has its work cut out for next year if it still wants to keep up with the big players, and it will be interesting to see if the Chinese company can match the performance at lower prices.