The Huawei P50 series will be available in limited quantities because of the scarcity of the Kirin 9000 chipset

Although Huawei has already received some licenses to trade with US companies, it cannot purchase high-end chipsets from Qualcomm, with Huawei restricted to Qualcomm's 4G chipset portfolio, instead. Equally, Huawei cannot produce new Kirin chipsets through companies like TSMC, leaving it at a loss when it comes to releasing new flagship smartphones. 

The P50 series is thought to be Huawei's next flagship series, but it may be in short supply because of Huawei's inability to source new 5G chipsets. According to The Elec, Huawei plans to use its HiSilicon Kirin 9000 SoC, which debuted on the Mate 40 series.

The Kirin 9000 offers eight cores separated into three clusters. The prime Cortex-A77 core offers the best single-core performance with a peak clock speed of 3.31 GHz, while three additional Cortex-A77 cores can reach 2.54 GHz. Huawei has complemented these Cortex-A77 cores with another four Cortex-A55 cores, along with a Mali-G78 MP24 GPU. The Kirin 9000 is one of the first chipsets to be built on a 5 nm process, too.

Ultimately, the use of the Kirin 9000 in the P50 series may explain why Mate 40 series devices are so few and far between. Huawei will have access to components from LG Display and Samsung Display though, with both companies having been granted trading licenses by the US government. However, the P50 series will still arrive with Huawei Mobile Services (HMS) instead of Google Mobile Services (GMS), which means no Play Store or Google account integration.