Huawei recently unveiled its Mate 90 smartphone series and placed a special focus on its latest in-house chip architecture, amid continued U.S. curbs on advanced semiconductor shipments.
The Mate 90 range comprises four models running on Huawei’s HarmonyOS 7, which the company said supports more than 450,000 apps and services. Pricing starts at CNY5,999 ($895) for the base Mate 90, with the top end Mate 90 RS Ultimate Design reaching CNY12,999.
The premium models use Huawei’s Kirin 9050 Pro chipset, which the vendor claimed delivers a 31% performance boost compared with the previous generation. The chip also integrates Huawei’s LogicFolding technology, which restructures chip wiring vertically to enable denser processing, shorter critical paths and reduced latency.
Price hikes
In a briefing, Huawei executive director and consumer business chief Richard Yu explained the Chinese vendor developed the technology in response to restrictions on advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
“Our LogicFolding technology is just an approach we adopt to improve our capabilities when our access to certain technology is restricted”, he said.
“Currently, the production capacity for advanced semiconductors in China is indeed limited,” Yu noted, adding semiconductor and smartphone production capacity “remains tight” due to the “sharp price increase for memory components over the past two years”.
To that end, he revealed component price hikes had added more than $200 to the cost of each handset, while Huawei’s margins were coming under pressure. “Moving forward, we will have to increase our prices, too,” he concluded.
Source: Mobile World Live
Image Credit: Huawei
Source: Tahawul Tech