Huawei Mate 40 is the last phone to use Kirin chip

Yu Chengdong, president of Huawei's consumer business, recently said that the Huawei Mate 40 series may be the company's last mobile phone to use Kirin chips. This news has attracted great attention from the industry. 

Foreign media Android authority recently expressed its views on this incident. It stated that with the gradual implementation of US sanctions, American or foreign chip manufacturers with US technology that do not obtain a license will not be able to manufacture chips for Huawei, including TSMC and Samsung. Without a suitable manufacturing partner, Huawei's Kirin chip may be temporarily out of the market.

In addition, it believes that although Huawei can outsource the manufacturing of some Kirin chips to SMIC, SMIC is relatively backward in chip manufacturing process and lithography machine technology, and there is still a gap with TSMC and Samsung. Therefore, it cannot be used as Huawei's high-end foundry option.

Currently, Huawei is still allowed to purchase 5G chips from competitors, but the premise is that these design companies are not in the United States. Qualcomm is obviously impossible at present (there are reports that Qualcomm is applying to the US government to sell chips to Huawei), and Samsung has no example of selling Exynos chips in large quantities to other companies, so MediaTek has become the best choice.

To be precise, Huawei does not have many choices at present. Earlier, there were reports that Huawei has increased its chip purchases from MediaTek by up to 3 times, and it is rumored that Huawei has ordered 120 million chips. However, Android authority believes that MediaTek's current high-end chip Dimensity 1000 is not a suitable replacement for Huawei's flagship Kirin chip. Even though MediaTek's high-end chips are basically at the same level as Kirin's high-end chips in terms of performance in all aspects, there is still a gap in brand positioning and self-developed uniqueness.

Due to the loss of Kirin chips, Huawei's mid-to-high-end mobile phones may lose their unique selling points in terms of both rationality and sensibility. Another point is that Android authority believes that compared with Huawei being banned from using Google Play Store services a year ago, the ban on its Kirin chips may make Huawei another general smartphone manufacturer.

From the perspective of Kirin chips, although the general CPU cores all use ARM cores, the Kirin SoC contains an ISP independently designed by HiSilicon, which has a built-in BM3D noise reduction algorithm and supports its unique RYYB sensor technology, which directly affects the imaging function of Huawei mobile phones.

In addition to the ISP image core, the addition of the Da Vinci architecture is also an important component of the Kirin SoC, which is a display of AI capabilities, including low-power voice, gesture control, facial recognition, security and other functions. Of course, don't forget Huawei's most proud Balong 5G baseband, which is also integrated into the Kirin SoC. Therefore, don't think that it is easy to find a replacement chip. In order to have your own unique functional selling points in today's fierce mobile phone market, the coordinated development of software and hardware is essential.

Finally, Android authority said that Huawei phones switching to MediaTek chips may affect their performance, functions, costs, etc., and will further weaken their product appeal in the global and Chinese markets. The absence of Kirin chips is really bad for Huawei.