Huawei Mate 40 Pro Geekbench sighting reveals Kirin 9000 performance

Huawei already revealed the date for what may be its last big event this year and the mobile tech industry will be all eyes on what may also be its last big phone if things don't improve for it. The Huawei Mate 40 will arrive next week with what could be the next level in mobile photography. Judging by these benchmark numbers, it could also come with a powerful processor which only makes Huawei's semiconductor predicament all the more poignant.

As far as specs go, the Huawei Mate 40, or at least the Huawei Mate 40 Pro in this particular instance, will come with what is believed to be named the Kirin 9000. one of the extremely few 5nm processors in the market to date. That will be accompanied by 8GB of RAM though it's highly likely there will be configurations that will offer more.

A bit more interesting, however, are the Geekbench scores spotted by 91mobiles for this particular Huawei phone, 1020 and 3710 for single and multi-core tests, respectively. Those alone take it above what the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865+ has shown on the same benchmarking suite. That said, take the figures with a grain of salt as Huawei has been known to tweak benchmark performance a bit, even in retail models.

The Kirin 9000 would be HiSilicon's crowning glory but that triumph could be cut short because of US trade and export bans. It could be the last chip Huawei will be able to make and only raises the bar high, making it almost impossible for the company to find a chipmaker that could fill in those shoes.

The benchmark also shows that Huawei will be shipping with Android 10 only, which shouldn't be a surprise given how the company has more than upgrading its EMUI skin to Android 11 to worry about. Much of the specs for the Huawei Mate 40 series are still unknown but if the design is anything like what the renders suggest, it could be a divisive phone in more ways than one.