Huawei will reportedly unveil its first 5nm chipset for the Mate 70 flagship series in October later this year, but previous rumors did not divulge the official name of the silicon. Fortunately, just a short time passed, and new information came through, claiming that the SoC would be called Kirin 9100, and it obtained a score of 1.1 million in AnTuTu as part of its initial performance run.
Kirin 9100 was previously said to match the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1’s performance, but no benchmark was specified at the time
The rumor originated from Weibo, with an individual going by the name @DirectorShiGuan claiming on the overseas microblogging social network that the Kirin 9100 obtained a score of 1.1 million. The post was spotted by Huawei Central, but if you notice, there is no mention of the AnTuTu benchmark. Fortunately, that is unnecessary because the only testing suite that provides the results in millions is AnTuTu.
When we checked the benchmarking website’s leaderboards, we discovered that the score matches what Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 would obtain when running on various Android-based smartphones. In comparison, the Kirin 9010 that powers Huawei’s latest Pura 70 series can attain a score of 960,000 and 980,000, making the Kirin 9100 between 12-14 percent faster.
Given that the upcoming silicon is said to be mass produced on SMIC’s 5nm process, we should expect better energy efficiency paired with that slight performance bump. We did report that the Kirin 9100 would be as fast as the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1, but as far as current results go, Huawei’s upcoming chipset is a step below that.
It was always going to be difficult for Huawei to catch up to competitors with the U.S. trade ban in place, and even with the 5nm SoC launch, the company is a couple of generations behind. Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Apple are expected to unveil their 3nm products later this year, meaning that Huawei’s performance and power-efficiency gap could widen further.