The recent suggestion by one of the executives Huawei that the Huawei Mate 40 series is likely to be the last of the company's phones to use its own Kirin chipset has upset many, but it's just inevitably. US trade sanctions against the Chinese giant now extend to foreign chip makers. We can say that not everyone, but only those who use or license American technologies, but in reality this is almost everything. As a result, this prevents TSMC or Samsung from producing chips for Huawei. Kirin is gone without a manufacturing partner. As simple as that. But will it just be a company that is faced with this?
Doing business Huawei is getting more difficult, but so far, fortunately, the company is doing it.
Where are Kirin processors used
In addition to the company's smartphones, this will have a major impact on its routers, switches and other equipment using Kirin chips. Then there is only an endless weighing of the options, pros and cons of different systems and offers from other manufacturers. In addition, you will have to adjust to the proposals and restrictions of the manufacturers themselves.
Huawei may contact its own Chinese Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) to handle Kirin production. However, even SMIC uses American-made equipment, so even in the short term it will still cause problems with Washington. In addition, SMIC lags far behind in advanced chip technology. Not only will it not be able to provide the company with 5nm chips, it hasn’t even made it to 7nm and 10nm. Its level is 14 nanometers. This option is generally not suitable for premium smartphones.
Alternatively Huawei it is still allowed to purchase chips from competing developers if they are not located in the US. This already excludes Qualcomm from the scheme. Samsung has no track record of selling large quantities of Exynos chips to third parties. Remains MediaTek.
Smartphones Huawei to MediaTek
Huawei has already started using chips MediaTek for some of their more affordable phones. Meanwhile, industry insiders speculate that purchases of Huawei from MediaTek will rise to 300% this year in light of the current situation. They even talk about ordering 120 million chips in an attempt to close the deficit. It remains to be seen if the Huawei Dimensity 1000 series from MediaTek deems a suitable replacement for premium models, but the company may have little choice if it wants to maintain its momentum.
Premium models cannot do without a truly top-end processor.
Even if this option works, the company loses the most important thing. Future phones Huawei risk losing almost everything that makes them special. They will lose the zest and the powerful tool that allowed the company to be flexible. This is much worse than losing access to Google Play. The company pulled up its app store, but in China it was not important, and problems with iron can haunt all markets.
What Huawei will lose without Kirin
As a result, the company will lose the unique miniature chip 5G built into Kirin 990 and newer versions. And yet she will not be able to use the artificial intelligence module adapted specifically for it and the gaming capabilities of its devices so powerfully.
Kirin is also at the forefront of machine learning with its custom Da Vinci architecture. It allows for ultra-high resolution zoom images, low power voice recognition, gesture control, security face recognition, and more. Well, and again, 5G. Now another company will decide what this chip will be, and smartphones Huawei will simply become “universal stamping”.
Quite simply, the situation can be compared to the fact that a person has always sewed suits for himself and looked great. Now he will buy ready-made. They will also be comfortable and fit well, but that is still not the case. Without Kirin Huawei he will no longer be himself.
Without Kirin, there is no doubt that Huawei's ability to adapt and withstand the pressures of the US trade embargo will be further diminished. Kirin is penetrating directly into the core of the smartphone business Huawei, and its future seems to be now firmly in who and how the company can negotiate.
Huawei we have to solve more and more new tasks.
Since there are no signs on the horizon of a complete replacement for TSMC, Huawei, it may be necessary to find a new close partner at MediaTek. With all due respect to this company, the release of new 5G models for the premium segment is not their strong point. Budget models are suitable for their use, but definitely not Huawei P50 Pro or Honor 40 Pro.
Not only will this affect the performance of devices and their optimization, it will also affect the cost of smartphones. It is much cheaper to produce large batches of your own processor than to buy someone else's development. As a result, smartphones will become not only worse, but also more expensive.
Future Huawei
Having just displaced Samsung from the leading position in the mobile industry, Huawei still has a small margin of safety that will not allow the company to fall to the bottom instantly. Nevertheless, the company needs to do something to turn the tide.
It will be a shame to lose such smartphones. Let's hope we don't have to.
We can say that if the situation turns out to be temporary, then the company will then start producing its chips again and everything will fall into place, but this is not so. Stopping developing its own chips Huawei will lag behind other manufacturers and will no longer be able to catch up with them.
Just making them “just in case” is also a bad option, since it is a huge investment. Even Huawei will not be able to spend that kind of money without prospects. Not only must the money invested in development be recouped, but the developments will not be complete unless they are released outside the laboratories in the form of hundreds of millions of smartphones.
Summing up, we can say that it is not yet clear what other sanctions will be imposed on Huawei, but the current restriction is much more terrible than the ban on working with Google. Even permission to use off-the-shelf chips from other companies does not save the day. The company needs its own processor, which made it one of the leaders in the industry. It's not just gigahertz under the lid. Without it, everything else can fall apart: camera, artificial intelligence, charging, and so on.