The Kirin 9010, the Huawei chipset used with the new Pura 70 series, has equivalent performance to the SD 870 but consumes 50% more

Announced last week, the Huawei Pura 70 series of phones is selling incredibly well in its home market of China, but may struggle in Western markets where consumers are more spec-conscious and lack patriotic zeal to support the “national” smartphone brand.

Although touted as an improved version of the Kirin 9000 chip used in last year’s flagship, the Kirin 9010 actually uses manufacturing technologies that Western semiconductor manufacturers have mastered since at least 6 years ago. Put in this context, the fact that the new Huawei chip manages to match the Snapdragon 870, a Qualcomm chip from 3 years ago, shows that its architecture has solid foundations and the level of performance and efficiency is only restrained by the limitations of the manufacturing technology developed by the local manufacturer SMIC .

The major difference between the SD 870 and the Kirin 9010, however, is power consumption, with Huawei’s solution using 50% more power to deliver a similar level of performance. Compared to phones based on Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1, the Huawei Pura 70 is 30% slower and hotter under intensive use. But is that enough to make Huawei phones fail in Western markets? Of course, Huawei does not have access to new manufacturing technologies for chipsets and is still cut off from the Google services demanded by consumers in Western markets. But they all appreciate the very attractive exterior design, build quality and excellent attributes in almost every other chapter: screen quality, photo performance, appearance and speed of the interface based on HarmonyOS, Huawei’s interpretation of Android.

Although Huawei Pura 70 does not lack 5G connectivity, keeping this technology also on a possible edition addressed to global markets is problematic, as the product risks falling under the spectrum of trade bans imposed by the US.

With or without 5G support, the Kirin 9010 is expected to debut on the Huawei Mate 70 series of phones, which is set to be unveiled in the second part of this year for global markets.