The Kirin 990 processor may have shown up on Geekbench for the first time

The latest HiSilicon flagship SoC, the Kirin 990, has been released in 2 main variants: the base 990 (which is LTE only) and the arguably more powerful 5G version. It is now possible that the former has taken a starring role as the processor in a new Geekbench leak already.

The device in question is listed as the Huawei NLE-AL00 on this benchmarking website. Its main chipset is not named explicitly in its results page. However, Geekbench does pick it up as an octa-core HiSilicon platform (which matches the 990's specs so far) with the identifier of "ARM implementer 72 architecture 8 variant 3 part 3392 revision 0". The Kirin 980, on the other hand, has been detected as an "ARM implementer 72 architecture 8 variant 1 part 3392 revision 0" on the same platform (in the Honor 20 Pro).

Therefore, this listing may indeed be based on the Kirin 990 (or an alternate version of the 980 - or be a forgery). The NLE-AL00 is also associated with 8GB of RAM and Android 10, thus inviting speculation that it is the Mate 30 or 30 Pro. Then again, earlier leaks have linked these devices with different model numbers - for phones that have already been certified besides.

The only other Kirin 990 device known to benchmarking is the equally 8GB "Huawei Dev Phone" that now sits atop an AI yardstick's rankings. Could it then also be responsible for this new Geekbench listing? Not likely. It is thought to refer to the LTE version of this chipset as the base clock here is 1.86 GHz (and not the 1.80 GHz of the 980), whereas the 5G variant found in the prototype is faster in this respect.

Furthermore, the NLE-AL00 has scored 3842 and 11644 in single- and multi-core scores respectively. This is more or less comparable with many Geekbench results posted by the Snapdragon 855 Plus-powered iQOO Pro. However, it is possible that more can be expected out of the Kirin 990 5G. Therefore, should this listing refer to a device to be released this year, it may hope to rival the 855 Plus, but not do much more beyond that.