Huawei’s Kirin 9100 might be similar to Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in performance

Huawei was a big game player in SoC manufacturing with its wholly-owned subsidiary — HiSilicon. After the whole US-ban ordeal, the Chinese tech giant no longer had the means to develop chipsets with the latest tech, rapidly slowing down their progress. The company is working on the Kirin 9100 processor, which reportedly costs quite a sum to manufacture.

HiSilicon Kirin 9100 Rumours Round-up

Domestic Fabbing

International chipmakers like TSMC and Samsung use EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet) lithography to manufacture their processors. This allows them to achieve the latest fabbing process which offers better efficiency. However, HiSilicon — and Huawei by extension — can’t access such tech. Hence, it turned to China-based SMIC to develop Kirin 9100 chips.

The local semiconductor foundry is reportedly working on “n+2/3” fabrication which will be produced using Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) lithography with multiple patterning. This translates to 5nm nodes, and potentially an equivalent performance to that of Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. For reference, the Qualcomm chipset came out near the end of 2022, has 4nm fabbing, and offers a peak clock speed of 3.2GHz.

Thus, Hisilicon opting for a new tech to develop the Kirin 9100 is cool and all, but it still lags considerably behind the latest offering from Qualcomm and MediaTek in terms of performance.

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But the price…

That being said, this chipset is quite costly to manufacture. Foundries generally do not reveal such information. Hence, we are sourcing this information from a Chinese tipster. They claim that producing the Hisilicon Kirin 9100 costs the company about CNY 1,100 to 1,300. This comes out to be around USD 157 to 186.

In comparison, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 apparently costs USD 190. In the meantime, the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 is much cheaper at USD 155. Therefore, the upcoming Huawei silicon cost is similar to the other two heavy hitters, while its performance isn’t as potent.

HiSilicon Kirin 9100 Launch and Availability

Initially, the HiSilicon Kirin 9100 was supposed to debut in the Mate 60 series. However, that did not turn out to be the case. Now, it will likely be available in the Mate 70 series, which apparently includes four phones — the titular one, Mate 70 Pro, Mate 70 Pro+, and Mate 70 Extraordinary Master.

• Meanwhile, check out our 2024 flagship chipset comparison video: