Following the announcement of the Huawei Mate 90 series, the company has also taken the opportunity to unveil its new lineup of chips: the flagship Huawei Kirin 9030 and Kirin 9035. But Huawei has also unveiled its new Kirin 9050 and the Kirin 9050 Pro “LogicFolding” chips. Both are positioned higher than its flagship series.
Meet Huawei’s new LogicFolding chips
Starting with the Kirin 9050 Pro, it first appeared last month inside the Mate XT 2 tri-fold. Now it powers the Mate 90 Pro Max and Mate 90 RS too.
So why is this called a LogicFolding chip? Basically, instead of one flat layer of circuits, the chip uses “folded” two stacked layers that work as one. Huawei says it raises transistor density to 238 million per square millimeter, which is about 28% denser than the Kirin 9030. Its overall performance is up 31% over the Kirin 9030 as well.
The CPU has 9 cores and 16 threads, thanks to hyper-threading. It includes one 3.1GHz prime core, two 2.7GHz performance cores, four 2.2GHz efficiency cores, and two 1.75GHz small cores. Multi-core performance is up 23%, GPU rendering is up 40%, and NPU performance is up 140%.
The rest of the lineup includes the Kirin 9030, which debuted last year. The Mate 90 Pro gets the Kirin 9035, which leaks say is the same chip with faster clock speeds.
Why is this important?
Huawei can’t buy what its rivals use. US sanctions essentially block it from American technology, plus tech from US allies. That includes lithography machines from Dutch company ASML, which companies need to build the most advanced chips.
TSMC and others pack in more transistors by making them smaller. Huawei can’t follow that route. So how does it keep up? It builds up instead of shrinking down. Think of LogicFolding as an architectural workout for its chip design, one that fits more transistors into the same footprint.
Huawei has been hunting for workarounds for years, and this is its biggest breakthrough yet. By 2031, it hopes to match the density of a 1.4nm chip. That describes how tightly it packs transistors, not an actual 1.4nm process.
Huawei didn’t say who makes the Kirin 9050 Pro. However, there are some who speculate it could be SMIC.
The post Huawei LogicFolding Chips Stack Transistors Where Shrinking Them Isn’t an Option appeared first on Android Headlines.
