Sources and analysis: four of the eight CPUs in the Kirin 9000S SoC use Arm designs and four use Huawei-modified Arm designs, HiSilicon made the GPU, and more

Facing US sanctions, Chinese company emulates Apple by using its own designs in chips for Mate 60 Pro

Financial Times 2023-09-20 Qianer Liu

Context & Ripple Effects

Earlier teardown reporting identified the Mate 60 Pro's Kirin 9000S as a China-fabricated 7nm chip. This report adds architectural detail: Huawei’s chip effort combines licensed Arm-derived CPU designs with in-house modifications and a HiSilicon GPU.

The mixed design approach also follows Arm’s 2019 determination that it could continue supplying Huawei with Armv8-A and next-generation architecture designs. The distinction matters because the chip is neither wholly external nor wholly proprietary.

First-order effects

Huawei gains a more detailed account of the Kirin 9000S’s division of labor: four CPU cores use Arm designs, four use Huawei-modified Arm designs, and HiSilicon supplies the GPU.
The reported design preserves an Arm component in Huawei’s flagship SoC while demonstrating that Huawei can alter parts of the CPU implementation and control the graphics block.

Second-order effects

Huawei’s chip roadmap must support a hybrid engineering model—maintaining compatibility with Arm-derived designs while investing in the teams needed to modify CPU cores and develop GPU IP.
Because the SoC still incorporates Arm designs, the immediate result is reduced dependence on any single externally supplied block rather than a clean break from Arm-based architecture.

Third-order effects

If repeated across products, this model could make vertically integrated, locally controlled SoC design a more practical response to technology-access constraints, even when complete architectural independence remains out of reach.
The broader competitive advantage would shift toward sustained chip-design talent and integration capacity, not merely access to a foundry process or a single licensed core design.

The trend: This is one data point in the move toward second-source compute strategies that pair established architectures with increasingly proprietary silicon blocks.

Discussion

@briantycangco @briantycangco on x
I find it highly unlikely that China has shown all its cards when it comes to semiconductor development. It gains nothing from Huawei's release of the Mate 60 Pro smartphone except for more scrutiny and sanctions from the US and its allies (and embarrassing the Biden...
@echenze @echenze on x
“Analysis of the main chip inside the Mate 60 Pro smartphone, which launched at the end of last month and immediately sold out, reveals that Huawei has joined the elite group of Big Tech companies capable of designing their own semiconductors.” https://www.ft.com/...
@davidgaleuk David Gale on x
Told you so. The likely outcome of sanctions was always obvious to everyone but the terminally dim https://www.ft.com/...
@pstasiatech Paul Triolo on x
The Kirin 9000S also features a graphics processing unit and neural processing unit developed by HiSilicon. Its predecessor, the Kirin 9000 SoC, had relied completely on Arm for its CPUs and GPU. Yup [image]
@pstasiatech Paul Triolo on x
Huawei makes processor breakthrough in flagship smartphone Four of eight central processing units in the Mate 60 Pro's “system on a chip” (SoC) rely purely on a design by Arm, the British company whose chip architecture powers 99 per cent of smartphones. https://www.ft.com/...

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