Huawei’s Kirin 9030 For The Upcoming Mate 80 Flagship Smartphone Series Is Rumored To Provide A 20 Percent Performance Improvement, But Lithography Details Not Revealed
The Mate 80 family is expected to arrive in the fourth quarter of 2025, with Huawei sticking to its older strategy of unveiling a newer chipset with the flagship smartphone series. On this occasion, the company will likely announce the Kirin 9030, and for those thinking that the latter is just going to be an iterative update compared to the Kirin 9020, a rumor highlights a positive outlook, claiming that the SoC will deliver a 20 percent performance improvement. Unfortunately, there are a truckload of details that we are still uninformed about, so let us discuss those at length.
There is ambiguity in Kirin 9030’s performance comparison; rumor does not mention if the 20 percent uplift is against the Kirin 9020, or Kirin 9010
It is no secret that Huawei and its local foundry partner SMIC are struggling to get the ball rolling on the 5nm process, with even the Kirin X90 found in the newer notebooks utilizing the older 7nm process. These continued roadblocks mean that Huawei cannot compete with other players in the industry, but its Kirin 9030 could somewhat narrow that gap, at least according to a rumor from a Weibo user called ‘Guo, Jing,’ with Huawei Central reporting about the performance uplift delivered by the chipset.
The rumor is unclear on which generation the Kirin 9030 will achieve the aforementioned 20 percent performance boost against, so we cannot confirm if the difference is against the Kirin 9020 or the Kirin 9010. We also do not know which manufacturing process Huawei will leverage for its upcoming chipset, as there have been conflicting rumors about the company and SMIC having successfully developed the 5nm node without specialized EUV equipment, but have failed to take advantage of this technology to mass produce various chipsets and maintain some pace with the competition.
It is clear that the unfavorable yields make mass production financially and commercially unviable, so our assumption is that the Kirin 9030 will continue to use the 7nm process, unless we witness a miracle in the coming months. Regardless, having a 20 percent performance improvement over a previous-generation silicon while maintaining the same lithography is decent progress, and regardless of whether the chipset is slower than the competition, the Mate 80 series is anticipated to sell in droves.
