Details for mid-range Kirin 8030 chipset leak, show higher clock speeds than the 8020

Huawei is pretty secretive about its Kirin chipsets, especially ones that are yet to be officially announced. However, one Weibo leakster has details on an upcoming Kirin 8030.

This is a mid-range chip that might be used in future Huawei nova and Enjoy phones. For example, the recent nova 15 featured the Kirin 8020, which was also featured on the nova 14 Pro and nova 14 Ultra.

The Huawei nova 15 uses the Kirin 8020

The Kirin 8030 is said to be built on SMIC’s N+2 node, which is a 7nm FinFET node. Yes, that’s years behind the cutting edge, but keep in mind that SMIC and Huawei are basically having to re-invent the whole semiconductor industry.

While it’s an old node, Huawei has managed some impressive clock speed improvements. The CPU on the Kirin 8030 will use in-house Taishan cores: 1x super large core at 2.8-3.0GHz + 3x medium at 2.4-2.6GHz + 4x small cores at 1.8-2.0GHz.

For comparison, here’s the breakdown of the Kirin 8020 CPU: 1x super large at 2.28GHz + 3x medium at 2.05GHz and 4x small cores at just 1.3GHz.

There’s only so much that can be done on such a large node, though – the Kirin 8030 is described as having single-core performance similar to the Snapdragon 888 and higher multi-core performance. To be fair, the main issue with the 888 was power draw, not performance. And the 888 was fabbed on a 5nm Samsung node.

Anyway, the new chipset will probably use a Maleoon GPU and will target 100-120fps in select games. It’s not clear which games those might be, however.

The Kirin 8030 is a new design, so it will benefit from some new tech – like Huawei’s Barong 5G modem (with support for sub-6GHz and mmWave) and a powerful Leonardo da Vinci NPU that is said to be closer to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in terms of performance than the 888.

At the end of last year, SMIC announced that it had started volume production of its N+3 node (5nm) and did it without using EUV hardware. For reference, 7nm was when the transition from DUV to EUV started for Samsung and TSMC in late 2018/early 2019. But then they had access to ASML machines. The flagship Kirin 9030 is built on the N+3 node.

Via