In April this year, the Honor Play 4T was released. It sports a 6.39-inch charm-eye screen, with a 4.5mm aperture, and there is also a rear fingerprint recognition solution. Inside this phone, we could find the Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 710A processor.
According to the ‘China Star Market’ report (chinastarmarket.cn), this mobile chip ‘Kirin 710A’ is completed by the SMIC chip manufacturing process. It uses a 14nm process technology, clocked at 2.0GHz, which belongs to the previous frequency downgrade version of Kirin 710. The Kirin 710A represents a breakthrough in achieving zero localization and is an ice-breaking move for China’s semiconductor chip technology.
As for the first smartphone powered by the Kirin 710A, it also features a 48-megapixel main camera and a 2-megapixel depth-of-field lens, a built-in 4000mAh battery, and a 6GB + 128GB memory combination.
Kirin 710A and Kirin 710
However, let’s dig in details of the Kirin 710A.
This processor is based on the 12nm Kirin 710 released in 2018. But the Kirin 710A is said to use the 14nm process from Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC). As these two SoCs are almost identical, most of their parameters are the same as well. Say, the Kirin 710 processor was launched in July 2018 and was first used on the Huawei Nova 3i smartphone. It adopts a 12nm process and has an octa-core design using four A73 2.2GHz + four A53 1.7GHz cores. At the same time, this cho supports LTE Cat.12/13, and dual card dual 4G dual VoLTE.
By the way, there is also the Kirin 710F version found in the Play 3 series last year. The specifications have not changed, but the packaging factory has changed. It is packaged by China-based JCET Group.
When it comes to our protagonist, SMIC’s 14nm process is the same generation as TSMC’s 16nm process. However, the Kirin 710A’s CPU frequency has been dropped from 2.2GHz to 2.0GHz.
Anyway, the most interesting thing related to this chip is that Huawei is obviously transferring the core CPU production and manufacturing supply chain to domestic companies. So in the nearest future, Huawei will not depend on other companies at all.
Terry Ts