Huawei's sanctions-evading Kirin 9000S processor tested: significantly behind its Kirin 9000 predecessor that used TSMC tech

News
By Anton Shilov
published

It's tough to beat a 5nm processor with a 7nm chip.

Huawei
(Image credit: Huawei)

The year was 2020, and Huawei released its HiSilicon Kirin 9000, an application processor for smartphones that used TSMC's N5 (5nm-class) process technology and packed 15.3 billion transistors — just before the company got listed on the Entity List of the U.S. government and lost access to TSMC. In 2023, the company launched its Kirin 9000S: a version of the Kirin 9000 made by SMIC using its 2nd-gen 7nm-class process technology. Nanoreview.net this week tested the new system-on-chip and its verdict was not exactly favorable.

The new Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 9000S processor can keep up and even leave behind its predecessor when it comes to general-purpose CPU workloads, but when it comes to power efficiency and graphics workloads, it is considerably behind the Kirin 9000 that is now more than three years old. The results are not particularly surprising as it is hard to beat a 5nm processor with a 7nm SoC unless you sacrifice power efficiency and cost.

Nanoreview.net tested both the original Kirin 9000 and the Kirin 9000S in popular benchmarks, including AnTuTu 10, Geekbench 6, 3DMark Wild Life, and numerous mobile games.

(Image credit: Nanoreview.net)

Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin 9000S demonstrated a similar total score (around 900,000 points) to the original Kirin 9000 in AnTuTu 10, but it was 33% behind in GPU performance than its ancestor. Surprisingly, despite lower clocks and the same core count, the Kirin 9000S was 4% faster in the single-thread Geekbench 6 workload and 17% faster in the multi-thread Geekbench 6 workload. The Kirin 9000 is also 20% faster than the Kirin 9000S in 3DMark Wild Life, which is probably because the company could not build a GPU that would be as fast as a 24-cluster Arm Mali-G78 (1536 stream processor) working at 759 MHz. 

Since SMIC's 2nd Generation 7nm technology is clearly much less advanced than TSMC's N5 production node, the Kirin 9000S is clearly significantly less efficient than the Kirin 9000, so expect smartphones based on the new SoC to offer shorter battery life unless they are equipped with a higher capacity battery.  

Although the new HiSilicon Kirin 9000S is tangibly slower than its processor, it still seems to be a quite good SoC for smartphones, so eventually Huawei might come up with a chip that will beat its 2020 product. The only question is whether it will be competitive against offerings from Apple, MediaTek, and Qualcomm.

Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Freelance News Writer

Anton Shilov is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

23 Comments Comment from the forums
  • linuxdude
    Strange, how much attention is drawn to China's chip industry here at tomshardware.
    When looking at the current newsfeed, out of 12 shown articles 3 directly relate to china's semiconductor industry - I can't remember seeing the same density when it comes to Taiwan's or South Korea's or US ever. Not even 3 articles related to semiconductors unrelated to the country of origin... so what is this all about?
    Reply
  • peachpuff
    linuxdude said:
    Strange, how much attention is drawn to China's chip industry here at tomshardware.
    I don't get it either, but Tom must pay per article so that must be it.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    linuxdude said:
    Strange, how much attention is drawn to China's chip industry here at tomshardware.
    Compared to elsewhere in the world, the semiconductor industry there is rapidly developing. Also, due to political tensions, it's an area of heightened interest.

    If you aren't interested in these articles, don't read read them.
    Reply
  • ThomasKinsley
    linuxdude said:
    Strange, how much attention is drawn to China's chip industry here at tomshardware.
    When looking at the current newsfeed, out of 12 shown articles 3 directly relate to china's semiconductor industry - I can't remember seeing the same density when it comes to Taiwan's or South Korea's or US ever. Not even 3 articles related to semiconductors unrelated to the country of origin... so what is this all about?

    It is unusual, but I appreciate it because it's one of the biggest news in tech. It has direct ramifications with US sanctions affecting American companies, such as Nvidia. Much of our tech also comes from Taiwan, and geopolitics directly affects that as well.
    Reply
  • ThomasKinsley
    What jumped out at me was the AnTuTu 10 benchmark that broke down the specs per category. In each category, except the GPU, the SMIC Kirin 9000S beat the TSMC Kirin 9000. (Kirin 9000S on the left). To be sure, the Kirin 9000 is an older chip and current offerings from Qualcomm and Samsung (not to mention Apple) smoke both of them, but it still shows that China's growth in the tech sector has not abated.

    CPU279677242171GPU200982315801Memory225491155272UX194615188275Total score897496894530
    Reply
  • TCA_ChinChin
    Results really weren't surprising at all. I don't think many thought that a 7nm process node chip could beat a 5nm one, its partially a physics problem. The bigger interest I think is that its a legitimate 7nm class process and once China has further developed their 5nm and more advanced nodes, they can improve by moving to those nodes.
    Reply
  • TJ Hooker
    Admin said:
    Nanoreview.net this week tested the new system-on-chip and its verdict was not exactly favorable.

    Anyone heard of Nanoreview before? It looks like one of those sites that just scrapes specs/benchmark results from other sites (and/or lets users submit them) and auto-generates product and comparison pages. I doubt they themselves did any testing of these chips. Which would mean we know nothing about under what conditions the tests were run or if they were comparable.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    ThomasKinsley said:
    What jumped out at me was the AnTuTu 10 benchmark that broke down the specs per category. In each category, except the GPU, the SMIC Kirin 9000S beat the TSMC Kirin 9000.
    You can partially compensate for a worse process node by boosting clock speeds, but then what suffers is battery life (see below).
    Reply
  • dysonlu
    linuxdude said:
    Strange, how much attention is drawn to China's chip industry here at tomshardware.
    When looking at the current newsfeed, out of 12 shown articles 3 directly relate to china's semiconductor industry - I can't remember seeing the same density when it comes to Taiwan's or South Korea's or US ever. Not even 3 articles related to semiconductors unrelated to the country of origin... so what is this all about?
    Good observation. I have Techmeme in my tech feed for more than a decade. And there too, there has been a steady increase of "news" about China in the last few years.

    There's only one explanation: insecurity. It means China is really catching up and fast and this is because the sanctions have backfired (triggered an enormous push for China's homegrown companies, while the lost in profit for western companies means less R&D). So, there's a need to construct a narrative to convince the masses that China is still far behind. (Fun fact those who don't believe China will ever catch up: US' Wolf Amendment prohibits NASA from working with China. Therefore, China was not allowed access to the ISS. China built her own space station. Recently, NASA asked the US government for an exemption to the Wolf Amendment so that it can access the moon rocks China shared with the global scientific community.)
    Reply
  • ivan_vy
    dysonlu said:
    Good observation. I have Techmeme in my tech feed for more than a decade. And there too, there has been a steady increase of "news" about China in the last few years.

    There's only one explanation: insecurity. It means China is really catching up and fast and this is because the sanctions have backfired (triggered an enormous push for China's homegrown companies, while the lost in profit for western companies means less R&D). So, there's a need to construct a narrative to convince the masses that China is still far behind. (Fun fact those who don't believe China will ever catch up: US' Wolf Amendment prohibits NASA from working with China. Therefore, China was not allowed access to the ISS. China built her own space station. Recently, NASA asked the US government for an exemption to the Wolf Amendment so that it can access the moon rocks China shared with the global scientific community.)
    https://spacenews.com/nasa-researchers-get-permission-to-apply-for-chinas-moon-samples/geopolitics hurting science. Politicians are not so tech savvy people and have short sighted objectives, sanctions are making the opposed intentions to come true.
    Reply