Huawei is now believed to add an even more premium variant to its new flagship Mate 60 smartphone series soon. The Pro Plus (or Pro+) is thought to have even more punch-hole than the existing Pro variant, although both might run on the same mysterious new processor. On that note, a new Weibo post claims to outline the alleged Kirin platform’s specs and performance metrics.
The 60 and 60 Pro currently remain the only 2 new Mate-series smartphones up for pre-order exclusively through Huawei’s Chinese sales channels without a sign of the usual E or RS variants – for now. The OEM is in fact now slated to resurrect the Pro+ variant from 2020 to augment the new line-up soon.
This “60 Pro+” is thought to adopt the new and more distinctive 60-series design, albeit possibly in a new “panda” finish and with even more cameras than the Pro. It might have as many as 5 shooters in its new Star Ring camera hump, plus at least 1 more selfie camera as it elaborates on the Pro’s new triple punch-hole with the top-end quad alternative.
Should the 60 Pro+ really launch soon, it is more certain that Huawei will, again, gloss over its SoC details in its promotional material. Nevertheless, a new WekiHome Mate 60 Pro teardown seems to confirm that the series does indeed rock the first HiSilicon chipset in generations.
The “Kirin 9000S” is reportedly sourced from SMIC’s 7 nanometer (nm) N+2 node, and, according to the (possibly ill-translated, yet still unreassuringly, titled) “Unreliable LAB” Weibo account, of a traditional 8-core composition with a by-now standard 1+3+4 cluster layout.
A Geekbench 5 analysis has alleged yielded underwhelming top clocks of 2.26GHz, 2.15GHz and 1.53GHz respectively for those groups. Then again, Unreliable LAB points out that the supposed 9000S’ threads (“CPU 0-11“) add up to 12, as the 4 slowest “small” cores are single-threaded while the remaining faster ones have 2 apiece.
Regardless, each thread is credited with the ability to reach its respective core’s top speed, although it seems Geekbench can only fully assess 7 of them. Accordingly, while Huawei might indeed be back to making its own flagship chips again, it apparently now lags multiple generational upgrades behind rivals such as Qualcomm and MediaTek in any case.
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Deirdre O Donnell – Senior Tech Writer – 6662 articles published on Notebookcheck since 2018
I became a professional writer and editor shortly after graduation. My degrees are in biomedical sciences; however, they led to some experience in the biotech area, which convinced me of its potential to revolutionize our health, environment and lives in general. This developed into an all-consuming interest in more aspects of tech over time: I can never write enough on the latest electronics, gadgets and innovations. My other interests include imaging, astronomy, and streaming all the things. Oh, and coffee.
Deirdre O’Donnell, 2023-09- 2 (Update: 2023-09- 2)
