Decoding the Huawei Kirin 9000s Chipset is Like Cracking the Enigma

The Huawei Mate 60 Pro is equipped with the Kirin 9000s chipset, but there’s a lot of speculation surrounding its specifics. AnTuTu Benchmark, Geekbench, and third-party software analyses have confirmed that the Mate 60 Pro features the Kirin 9000s chipset with the Maleoon-910 GPU. Rather than solving the mystery, these analyses have generated more questions due to inconsistent findings across different platforms.

There appear to be three versions of the Kirin 9000s chipset based on the analyses:

1. AnTuTu Benchmark identifies the Kirin 9000s chip model with a 12-core design: 2 A34 cores, 6 customized A78AE cores, and 4 A510 cores. It boasts a maximum frequency of 2.62GHz and a new architecture Maleoon-910 GPU with 750MHz.
2. Geekbench and third-party analyses suggest a three-cluster architecture with eight cores: 1 core at 2.62GHz, 3 cores at 2.15GHz, and 4 cores at 1.53GHz. The Maleoon-910 GPU is also present, and the operating system is identified as HarmonyOS 4.0 based on Android 12.
3. Another third-party analysis finds a two-cluster architecture: 4 large cores at 2.15GHz and 4 small cores at 1.53GHz. With Maleoon-910 GPU with 750MHz.

Speculation arises due to the unique architecture of the Kirin 9000s chipset, leading to varying findings among benchmarking platforms and third-party software. Some suggest that the chipset employs hyper-threading technology, featuring 8 cores and 12 threads.

According to another theory, the large core originates from Huawei’s Taishan V120 architecture, resembling an Arm A76 architecture based on Hi-Silicon’s modifications and build by SMIC. The Kirin 9000s is said to have a die area of 140mm2, larger than Apple’s A14, A15, and A16 chips. However, chip size doesn’t necessarily correlate directly with performance.