Huawei’s Kirin 8030 may have some impressive clock speeds
Huawei is quietly working on a new mid-range chipset, which may launch with the upcoming nova 16 series. According to leaked details spotted by Huawei Central, the company is almost done with the development of the Kirin 8030 chipset. That will be the successor to the Kirin 8020, which was used in the nova 15, nova 14 Pro, and nova 14 Ultra.The chip may be built on SMIC’s N+2 technology, which is essentially a 7 nm FinFET node, which was first used with the Kirin 9000s on the Mate 60 Pro. SMIC and Huawei have been on the US entity list since 2019, which limits their access to the US supply chain and more modern technologies.
Despite the old node, Huawei may have achieved impressive improvements in the processor’s clock speeds. Kirin 8030’s CPU will use in-house Taishan cores in the following configuration:
- 1x super large core at 2.9-3.0GHz
- 3x medium cores at 2.4-2.6GHz
- 4x small cores at 1.8-2.0GHz
The previous generation Kirin 8020 only reached 2.28GHz for its super large core, while the medium and small cores clocked at 2.05GHz and 1.3GHz, respectively.
Outdated performance
The Huawei nova 14 Pro featured a Kirin 8020 chipset. | Image Credit – Huawei
Despite the faster clock speeds, the chipset will still fall behind the most modern processors in terms of performance. The Kirin 8030 is reportedly going to match the single-core performance of the Snapdragon 888, which was launched over five years ago. The multi-core performance may be better than Qualcomm’s chipset.
The new chipset will use a Maleoon GPU, which may provide 100-120 fps in select games, though their titles aren’t mentioned in the leak. On a more advanced note, the chip may feature a Huawei Barong 5G modem with sub-6GHz and mmWave support and a Leonardo da Vinci GPU with a performance similar to the 2022 Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
Moving forward
While Huawei is surely not going to dominate the global smartphone market anytime soon, the development of its phones is one of the most interesting stories in the tech world. The company has to operate with the limitations of the aging technology it has access to, but that doesn’t stop it from making some impressive devices. I’m just curious to see how far this process can go.
