Huawei Mate 60 Pro Launched Discreetly With Mystery Over Its Chip

Huawei's smartphone business was crippled by US trade bans stopping Google sharing apps, rendering its phones unviable outside China. This forced selling its Honor brand, now returning to India. So eyebrows raised when Huawei quietly launched the Mate 60 Pro - what chipset powers it? Bans also blocked supplier TSMC making Huawei's HiSilicon processors.

Intriguingly, Chinese fab SMIC seemingly helped produce the Kirin 9000s system-on-chip in the phone, revealed by benchmarks. No Kirin chip has been seen since the 2019 Kirin 9000 made by TSMC pre-ban.

At launch, Huawei declined details on the processor or 5G capabilities. But benchmarks show a 12-core CPU with a 2.62GHz peak clock, suggesting Huawei managed an update to the 2019 chip with SMIC's help.

Past Kirin 9000 and 9000e SOCs supported 5G and used 5nm nodes, but relied on superior TSMC manufacturing. Apple also transitioned to 5nm chips with TSMC, and will soon move to 3nm.

Per the Southern China Post, the Mate 60 reaches 500Mbps download speeds, way above 4G's 100Mbps ceiling, with Huawei boasting it as the most powerful Mate yet.

However, SMIC as China's largest foundry can only make 14nm chips so far, restricted by US sanctions blocking access to advanced lithography machines over IP theft concerns.

This casts doubt on SMIC discreetly advancing enough to make Huawei's purportedly most advanced homegrown 5G chip.

Reports claim Huawei built secret fabs to bypass sanctions, with the Mate 60 potentially the culmination. It launched solely in China for $962.

The last Mate was the 5G-equipped Mate 40 in September 2020 alongside the iPhone 12. Huawei briefly even surpassed Samsung in shipments in 2020 before crashing from US bans.

Chinese chip stock rallied on the Mate 60 news. Huawei also touts satellite calling like the iPhone. But mystery lingers whether SMIC really cracked advanced nodes for the Mate 60's chip.