Huawei’s new flagship Mate 90 series’ Mate 90 Pro Max, one of the most powerful members of the series, has been spotted in Geekbench 7 tests with the performance of the company’s newly developed Kirin 9050 Pro. This new chipset is noteworthy as a valuable step taken by Huawei towards its goals of technological independence.

Huawei had chosen to keep the technical details of its new processor limited during the launch. However, the benchmark results that have emerged provide concrete information about the CPU structure and clock speeds of the Kirin 9050 Pro.

Processor test results fell short of expectations

The Mate 90 Pro Max scored an average of 1,317 points in single-core and 5,381 points in multi-core tests on Geekbench 7. The highest scores recorded on the platform were 1,528 and 6,169 points, respectively.

This information indicates that the processor performance of the Kirin 9050 Pro is positioned somewhere between the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, released in 2021, and its successor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. When compared to today’s contemporary flagship processors, the new chipset lags considerably behind.

For example, Qualcomm’s new flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, achieves around 3,500 points in single-core and 12,000 points in multi-core tests on the same testing platform. This reveals that Huawei still has a significant distance to cover to catch up with the competition in terms of hardware.

Kirin 9050 Pro Technical Specifications and Manufacturing Process

Geekbench records detail that the Kirin 9050 Pro has a nine-core CPU design. The processor includes one Prime Ultra core running at 3.1 GHz.

In addition to this main core, there is a total of six performance cores running at 2.7 GHz and 2.2 GHz. The architecture is completed with two efficiency cores running at 1.75 GHz.

On the graphics side, Huawei uses the six-core Maleoon 955 GPU. The clock speed of this graphics unit is listed as 1.05 GHz.

Huawei has not yet made a comprehensive statement about the architecture or manufacturing process of the chipset. However, a report prepared by Bernstein Research suggests that the Kirin 9050 Pro was developed by SMIC using a 7nm class manufacturing process.

The report states that the chip may have been manufactured with one of SMIC’s N+2 or N+3 manufacturing technologies. However, it should be noted that these technical details have not been officially confirmed by Huawei.

The Kirin 9050 Pro is used only in the top-segment models of the Mate 90 series. Of the four new Mate 90 models introduced in the Chinese market, only the Pro Max and RS versions come with this new processor.

US sanctions have severely restricted Huawei’s access to advanced foreign chip technologies. For this reason, the company is working hard to develop its own processor ecosystem. While the Kirin 9050 Pro is a step towards technological independence in this challenging process, the performance results clearly summarize the current situation. Do you think Huawei can catch up with its Competitors with its own processors? Share your thoughts with us.