Huawei is reported to be working on a new 5nm flagship processor tentatively named Kirin 1000. Rumor mills had earlier pegged the chip to be named as the Kirin 1020 though there seems to have been a change in mind somewhere.
Anyway, as @Mobile Chip Expert revealed in his tweet message, the Chinese company is readying the Mate 40 smartphone that would be the first to come powered by the new 5nm Kirin 1000 chip. The Mate 40 will likely be ready for a launch sometime in October with Huawei planning to ship around 8 million of the phones before the end of the year. Chinese site MyDrivers too has to share the same information.
Later on, Huawei is expected to follow that up with another smartphone named the P50 that too will be built around the Kirin 1000. The P50 family comprising of the base P50 and P50 Pro will be a camera centric phone and should be ready by the first quarter of next year.
Huawei also exuded confidence the sanctions imposed by the US Department of Commerce won’t affect its plans with the Kirin 1000 chips as orders for the same were placed before the sanctions were announced. The 5nm chips identified by the codename ‘Baltimore’ are being manufactured by TSMC and includes a Cortex-A78 CPU. The chip itself is expected to break cover in September.
Worth mentioning, the Huawei Mate 30 Pro is still fresh in the market, having been launched just in September last year. The phone is powered by the Kirin 990 chipset though its successor, the new Kirin 1000 chipset is projected to have a 50 percent boost in processing power. That should make for quite a bump is processing capabilities of the Mate 40 phone.
That said, it will be interesting to see how the Mate 40, or for that matter, all of Huawei’s future smartphones is able to manage without Android support. Those may sell well within China but are likely to face many challenges elsewhere in the world.
