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.

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.

By Anton Shilov