Huawei launches Mate 70 series with new Kirin 9020 chip

Huawei on Tuesday launched the latest editions of its annual flagship smartphone range, the Mate 70 series, featuring the new Kirin 9020 chip and the self-developed HarmonyOS NEXT operating system. “The Mate series has always been imitated but never surpassed. Copying will not lead to success,” said Yu Chengdong, Chairman of Huawei’s Consumer Business Group, at the product launch event.

Why it matters: Since 2019, US sanctions have curtailed Huawei’s access to key technologies, including semiconductor and software from US companies. The in-house production of the Kirin chip and HarmonyOS demonstrate Huawei’s resilience in the face of these challenges.

Details: The Mate 70 series comprises four models: Mate 70, Mate 70 Pro, Mate 70 Pro+, and Mate 70 RS. 

Although the Chinese tech giant hasn’t unveiled the processor specifications, Chinese tech blogger Digital Chat Station suggests the Mate 70 Pro, Pro+, and RS all debut the new Kirin 9020 chip, while the standard Mate 70 uses the older Kirin 9010. The Huawei Mate 70 Pro scores around 1.25 million on the performance benchmarking tool AnTuTu, similar to the iPhone 14’s score of around 1.28 million. Based on screenshots from another tech blogger Fixed-Focus Digital, the Kirin 9020 is a 12-core processor with two 2.5GHz high-performance cores, six 2.15GHz mid-performance cores, and four 1.6GHz efficiency cores. The Kirin 9020 potentially outperforms the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, released in 2022 and manufactured using TSMC’s 4nm process, the blogger asserted. Given that the native Harmony ecosystem is still under development for different applications, Huawei also provides its HarmonyOS 4.3 version (Android-compatible) as an alternative. Users can choose to upgrade from HarmonyOS 4.3 to HarmonyOS 5.0, which is non-Android compatible and is a pioneer edition of HarmonyOS NEXT. Over 15,000 native HarmonyOS applications and services are now available, according to Huawei.  Yu claimed that compared to the brand’s previous generation of phones (the Mate 60 series), the latest series has a frame rate 31% faster, and an overall performance improvement of 40%.  The Mate 70 standard model is priced between RMB 5,499 ($827) and RMB 6,999 ($965), depending on the storage configuration.

Context: In the third quarter of 2024, mainland China’s smartphone market was led by Vivo with a 19% share and 13 million units shipped, followed by Huawei (16%), Honor (15%), Xiaomi (15%), and Apple (14%), according to market analysts Canalys.