Together with the launch of the Mate 40 flagship series last October, Huawei unveiled the world's first chips manufactured using the 5nm process – the Kirin 9000 and its lightweight variant, the Kirin 9000E. Now, news has leaked out of China that Huawei is preparing another variant of this top-of-the-line chipset, while it should be manufactured by Samsung.
According to Chinese Weibo user WHYLAB, the new variant will be called the Kirin 9000L, and Samsung is said to be manufacturing it using a 5nm EUV process (the Kirin 9000 and Kirin 9000E were manufactured using a 5nm process by TSMC), the same one that makes its high-end chip Exynos 2100 and an upper mid-range chipset Exynos 1080.
The main processor core of the Kirin 9000L is said to "tick" at a frequency of 2,86 GHz (the main core of the other Kirin 9000 runs at 3,13 GHz) and should use an 18-core version of the Mali-G78 graphics chip (the Kirin 9000 uses a 24-core variant, the Kirin 9000 22E XNUMX-core).
It is said that the neural processing unit (NPU) will also be "chopped", which should get only one core, while the Kirin 9000 and Kirin 9000E have two.
At the moment, however, the question is how the foundry division of Samsung, Samsung Foundry, would be able to produce the new chip, when it too is prohibited from doing business with Huawei by the decision of the government of former US President Donald Trump.
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