Is Huawei about to take a special card up its sleeve in the battle for smartphone supremacy?
According to an industry leaker, its main processor is about to receive a boost, according to a report by GizmoChina.
Strangely, it’s been a few months since Huawei announced the Kirin 9000 processor.
The chipset comes in two variants – the Kirin 9000 and the Kirin 9000E – and is found only on the Mate 40 series smartphone, GizmoChina reported.
Now, an industry hijacker has revealed details about the upcoming flagship Kirin processor, which has been reported to be called the Kirin 9010.
Information about the new Kirin processor comes from the leaker @ RODENT950, and according to the tweet, the next-generation Kirin processor should arrive as the Kirin 9010 and will be a 3nm chipset, GizmoChina reported.
The Kirin 9000 was launched as the first 5nm processor for Android devices and after its announcement came the Samsung Exynos 1080 and Qualcomm Snapdragon 888.
While most people expect Huawei to follow the 5nm process for at least two years, this leak reveals that it is making the leap to 3nm on its next mobile chipset, which if all goes well, should be launched this year and possibly appear in the Mate 50 series in the fourth quarter, reported by GizmoChina.
It is speculated that other chip makers, like Qualcomm, may follow suit and switch to 3nm for their next-generation flagship chipset if the news about Huawei’s 3nm chipset is true.
The San Diego-based company is expected to announce a Snapdragon 888 Plus chipset later this year, which should be a 5 nm processor like its brother, but with a higher clock speed, GizmoChina reported.
Samsung, on the other hand, is skipping the 4nm process and jumping to 3nm.
Apple is also expected to announce 3nm processors that will be built by TSMC, but it should not arrive until 2022. So there is a chance that Huawei will be the first manufacturer to announce a 3nm chipset.
Chip processors are defined in nanometers (nm), where the number defines the distance between the transistors and other components within the CPU.
The lower the number, the more transistors can be placed in the same area, allowing for faster and more efficient processor designs.
Smaller transistors also consume less energy, which means less energy consumption. And due to lower power consumption, there is less heat dissipation, which means cooler processors.
However, it is not as easy as it seems – the process of reducing these processes. The manufacture of smaller transistors requires very precise instruments and machines, which is why processors built on smaller processes will be more expensive than older and larger ones.
Moore’s Law, an old observation that the number of transistors on a chip doubles each year while costs are halved, has been maintained for a long time, but has been declining recently.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, transistors were halved in size every two years, leading to major improvements in a regular schedule. But the additional shrinkage has become more complicated.
These new processors are the first major reductions in a long time and represent a brief relaunch of Moore’s law.
Sources: GizmoChina, TechTerms, HowToGeek, TheTechSite