Huawei HiSilicon is about to release a new Kirin processor model, which may be the Kirin 810

After the United States issued a ban, Huawei not only did not stop moving forward, but instead became more and more courageous. The self-developed operating system Hongmeng was exposed, and Huawei HiSilicon also became an overnight success.

According to the industry chain, HiSilicon, which has high hopes from Huawei, will make a big move in June. It will release a new Kirin processor. The model may be Kirin 810. This processor is likely to be released on June 21. The new generation of The nova 5 mobile phone is launched.

“Fortune and misfortune depend on, and misfortune lies with blessing”, the ban of the United States may make Chinese chips represented by Huawei go out of the sky, and for the American semiconductor giant, with one of the largest customers Huawei listed by the United States Entering the “entity list”, the decline in semiconductor demand is greatly affected, and the chip pattern in the international market is fissioned? Maybe it could happen.

Kirin’s new processor benchmarks against Qualcomm Snapdragon 7

Not long after Huawei announced that it will launch Huawei nova 5 on June 21, some netizens recently broke the news that Huawei nova 5 will be equipped with the Kirin 810 processor.

For a long time, Huawei relied on the Kirin 980 to compete with Qualcomm 855 in the high-end field, but in the low-end market, it was only supported by the Kirin 710 processor released a long time ago. According to the tradition of releasing a mid-range SoC every year, it is logical for Huawei to release a new processor.

According to industry chain news, the HiSilicon Kirin 810 processor, which Nova5 will launch for the first time, can be regarded as an upgraded version of Kirin 710. Both the CPU and GPU will be upgraded. With the blessing of the 7nm process, it has a very powerful The performance and power consumption performance are not expected to be much worse than the Kirin 980.

Industry chain sources said that from Huawei’s point of view, the Kirin 810 mainly targets the rival Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 series. This new chipset is likely to be the chipset for future Huawei and Honor mid-range and mid-to-high-end phones in the next 1 year or beyond.

According to the latest information released by the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), the Honor 9X Pro with model number HLK-L41 has been certified and is rumored to be powered by the Kirin 810 processor.

It is worth mentioning that under the unfavorable situation of being cut off by many parties, Huawei can successfully launch new processors without the open and unconditional support of a giant, that is, TSMC. Huawei’s Kirin chips are only produced based on TSMC, and the Kirin 810 uses TSMC’s 7nm process.

At a time when rumors that TSMC will stop cooperation with Huawei are flying, TSMC has repeatedly issued a document saying: It will not stop business cooperation with Huawei, but will strongly support Huawei.

TSMC’s statement gave Huawei a “reassurance” that the Kirin 980 chip will be supplied as usual. In addition, TSMC also claimed that it will be the first to use the most advanced 7nm process for the Kirin 985 chip. The new process adds EUV ultraviolet lithography technology, which can increase the density of transistors in the chip by 20%, making the components more powerful and lower energy consumption. Both power consumption and performance are 20% higher than the previous version.

Judging from the news given by Huawei, Huawei Mate30 series is expected to use Kirin 985 chip, which means that Huawei Mate30 is likely to become the first mobile phone to use the latest chip technology, which is bound to be ahead of Apple, Qualcomm and other US Competitors, because the A13 processor that Apple has already trial-produced this year, is also based on TSMC’s 7nm process, but has not introduced EUV ultraviolet lithography technology.

Blocking Huawei hurts the US chip giant

Since Huawei was included in the Entity List by the United States due to “security” issues, domestic companies in the United States have successively cut off their supply to Huawei. Although the cut-off has had a corresponding impact on Huawei, the stifling has also hurt their own people.

American chip giant Broadcom bears the brunt. Broadcom announced a few days ago that it lowered its revenue forecast for fiscal 2019 to $22.5 billion, an 8% decrease from the $24.5 billion expected three months ago, and a direct decrease of about $2 billion.

In this regard, many media analysts said that Broadcom’s reduction in revenue guidance this time is partly due to the US ban on Huawei sales, in addition to the global economic slowdown and sluggish demand for semiconductors. It is reported that Huawei contributed about 900 million US dollars to Broadcom last year, accounting for about 4% of its total revenue.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said that the bigger negative impact is that the market’s concerns about the macroeconomic downturn caused by the escalating Sino-US trade friction have caused the company’s customers to reduce inventory levels.

Not only is Broadcom pessimistic, but Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of Micron, another U.S. chip maker, also said on the 14th that the ban on Huawei (by the U.S. side) has added some uncertainty to the semiconductor field. brought turmoil.” Huawei was Micron’s largest customer last year, accounting for 13% of Micron’s sales.

With the spread of pessimism, even chip giants such as Intel and Qualcomm can’t sit still. Some media quoted people familiar with the matter as saying that a number of US chip suppliers, including Intel and Qualcomm, are secretly pressuring the US government to relax the ban on supply to Huawei.

In addition to Qualcomm and Intel, a person familiar with the matter said that Xilinx, another top chip maker in the United States, believes that Huawei, which usually sells smartphones and computer products, uses normal components and is unlikely to appear similar to 5G network equipment. “Security Concerns”.

According to reports, Huawei purchased a total of $70 billion worth of components in 2018, of which about $11 billion worth of components came from U.S. companies.

Some analysts said that once Huawei chooses suppliers from other countries, it will bring a heavy blow to the US chip industry.

Restricted or accelerated Huawei Hisilicon’s strength to break through

Thirty years Hedong, thirty years Hexi. In the past 30 years, the global semiconductor market has basically been dominated by Japan, the United States, and South Korea.

Since the 1970s, Japanese companies have been committed to introducing semiconductor technology from the United States and other countries. In the early 1980s, the production and research and development of Japanese semiconductors entered a heyday, occupying half of the semiconductor industry. Toshiba, Sony, Fujitsu, Panasonic and a series of excellent companies.

Subsequently, the Japan-US trade war broke out in the 1980s, and the semiconductor industry became the most tragic battlefield. In the early days of the war, Japan led the United States by virtue of the production of memory sticks, while the United States relied on the price war to suppress Japan’s profits.

When the fight between Japan and the United States was exhausted, the U.S. Department of Commerce suddenly “showed weakness” to Japan: how we fight is always not the way, or let’s make a “gentleman’s agreement”, you reduce the export share, I will share the Chinese market with you equally .

As soon as the US side said something, the Japanese cabinet made a small calculation: don’t suffer, just sign it. In September 1986, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry formally signed the “US-Japan Semiconductor Agreement” with the United States.

As a result, in the future, Qualcomm and Intel squeezed out Japan at prices far below the market, occupying the Chinese market. The failure of the tactic of the trade war with the United States, coupled with the rigidity of the Japanese corporate system, led to the collapse of Japanese semiconductor companies across the board.

In 1995, among the top ten semiconductor companies in the world, NEC (first), Toshiba (second), Hitachi (third), Fujitsu (eighth), and Mitsubishi Electric (ninth), and by 2018, with the After Toshiba, the only company that can still rank among the top ten in the world, sold its semiconductor division, the era of Japanese companies’ semiconductors was completely turned over.

Since the late 1980s, in the contest with Japan, the US semiconductor industry has been singing all the way. Today, Intel, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Micron, etc. dominate the world semiconductor market.

However, in the past two years, Korean companies have sprung up. Samsung has won the first place in 2017 and 2018 in a row, while another Korean company, Hynix, has also squeezed into the top three, and its performance is very outstanding.

What is gratifying is that in the world’s semiconductor map, China’s power is gradually growing. In the global semiconductor market report for the first quarter of 2019 released by Ic Insights recently, in addition to TSMC, there is one more Chinese company on the list, and Huawei HiSilicon is also the only company in the mainland.

Huawei HiSilicon ranked 14th in the world this time, with sales of 1.755 billion US dollars. In the same period last year, Huawei HiSilicon also ranked 25th, advancing 11 places in one year. In terms of sales, Huawei HiSilicon is also The most improved, with a year-on-year increase of 41%.

As we all know, Huawei’s mobile phone chips are not sold to the outside world, but only for Huawei itself. Starting this year, with the continuous increase in shipments, Huawei has intentionally increased the proportion of Kirin processors in its own mobile phones and reduced the purchase of Qualcomm and other chips. proportion, weaning off its dependence on the United States. At present, Huawei’s high-end mobile phones all use self-developed processors, and Huawei will speed up the introduction of low-end mobile phones into the HiSilicon Kirin platform.

With the blockade of the United States and the launch of the “spare tire” plan for HiSilicon chips, it is not difficult to foresee that the supply of Huawei HiSilicon chips will increase, and the sales of Huawei HiSilicon will further increase.

In fact, Huawei’s self-developed chips have covered many fields such as mobile phones, AI, servers, routers, TVs, video decoding chips, and security fields. For example, 60% of surveillance camera equipment in the United States uses Huawei HiSilicon chips. In the world, HiSilicon occupies 70% of the security market. At present, the old Hikvision in the global security industry uses HiSilicon chips.

This time Huawei is in trouble, and many domestic companies have expressed their support. Xiaomi’s Mijia mall has launched its own driving recorder some time ago, and the processor used is Huawei’s HiSilicon processor. Xiaomi founder Lei Jun said that in the future, Xiaomi will have more products using Huawei’s HiSilicon processors.

Sow a thousand seeds and reap a full warehouse of grain. HiSilicon was established in 2004. It is said that 40% of Huawei’s research funding over the years has been invested in chips, and it has invested as much as 400 billion yuan in 10 years. With the continuous support of huge amounts of money, Huawei, which has been researching chips for 15 years, has gained the Kirin 980 and Balong 5000.

On June 17, when Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, and Negropon, a columnist of the US “Wired” magazine, were drinking coffee and talking about technology in Shenzhen, Negropon sighed: We are no longer the absolute leader in the semiconductor field, and we have no choice. Using the advantages of semiconductors to make China succumb, Taiwan is currently leading in semiconductors, and Apple’s CPUs are all produced in Taiwan. Like Intel is not so dominant anymore, we are no longer in that era.

To this, Ren Zhengfei replied: “China is a late-developing country after all, and the United States has made progress for more than 100 years.”

Huawei has always admired “a cup of coffee absorbs the energy of the universe”. Ren Zhengfei said, “When we were not strong before, we had to strengthen cooperation with American companies. Why not cooperate with American companies when we are stronger?” Calm, rational voice.

The development of the integrated circuit industry requires eclecticism, as well as long-term ideological preparation and investment. As Ni Guangnan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said, we cannot expect to get returns in just a few years. To truly develop the integrated circuit industry, I am afraid it will take ten to twenty years. In the next ten years, it may be the world of Chinese chip companies.