Huawei Proprietary Chips to Return in H2 of This Year

On May 15, Chinese digital blogger “Dingjiao Shuma” disclosed that Huawei will have a big move in the second half of the year. Its self-developed chips may start to emerge and chips named Ascend, Kunpeng, Tiangang and Balong will all return. Compared with these chips, many care more about the Kirin chip used on Huawei smartphones. The blogger said that the flagship Kirin chip will be delayed and not released this year.

The blogger stated that the performance of Ascend 920 is very strong, which can catch up with NVIDIA’s H100. Moreover, the basic technical route of Kirin can be seen through Ascend 920. Huawei has a wide variety of self-developed chips. In addition to the most talked Kirin chip, Ascend is an AI chip, Kunpeng is a server chip, and Tiangang and Balong are baseband chips.

Before being added to the US Entity List, Huawei’s HiSilicon semiconductor had been steadily ranked among the top 10 global semiconductors. Data showed that in 2020, HiSilicon’s revenue was $8.2 billion, but in the second quarter of last year, HiSilicon’s market share had already reached zero.

In terms of mobile phone business, the Kirin 9000 series has already been a “last masterpiece”. There have been no mass-produced smartphone models using Kirin high-end chips after Huawei Mate X2 and Huawei P50 Pro.

SEE ALSO: OPPO Disbands ZEKU Team, May Give up Self-developed Chips

Besides Huawei, there are some other Chinese manufacturers hoping to break free from restrictions through self-developed chips. However, as the rising star in China’s domestic chip design industry that has received the most attention, ZEKU, the chip arm under OPPO, announced on May 12 that it would dissolve its chip business. OPPO stated that the reason for abandoning self-developed chips was due to “global economic uncertainty and uncertainty in the mobile phone market”. The relevant introductions of two self-developed image chips, “Mariana X” and “Mariana Y”, have also been removed from the official website.

In addition, before OPPO, Xiaomi also had great ambitions, but the first generation of Surge S1 chip did not perform well and Xiaomi subsequently changed its design direction. In the eyes of some industry insiders, Xiaomi has withdrawn from the big chip battlefield.