Huawei's Kirin 9050 Pro beats Apple's A17 Pro in multicore tests — but trails A20 Pro by 30%
Huawei's new Kirin 9050 Pro has outperformed Apple's A17 Pro in Geekbench 6 multicore benchmarks, according to an analysis by Bernstein Research — a notable result for a chip built without access to advanced EUV manufacturing equipment. The catch: it still trails Apple's current A20 Pro by around 30%, and neither the chip nor the phone it powers will reach the US or UK.
The chip
The Kirin 9050 Pro debuted inside Huawei's Mate XT 2 adopts the fold design Samsung already gave up on in early September, priced at roughly 19,999 yuan (around $2,800) in China. Huawei doesn't publish manufacturing details, but Bernstein estimates the chip is equivalent to a 7nm-class process — likely SMIC N+2 or N+3 — built using older DUV lithography rather than the EUV scanners that TSMC and Samsung use for Apple's A-series chips.
The multicore win over A17 Pro comes down to architecture, not process nodes. Huawei applied what Bernstein calls a "Tau Scaling Law" approach — reducing internal signal path lengths to squeeze more performance from a less advanced fab process. It works well enough for parallelised workloads, which is where multicore scores matter. Single-core performance is a different story: the Kirin 9050 Pro's estimated score of around 2,084 in Geekbench 6 falls well behind the A18 Pro's ~3,582.
The Kirin 9050 Pro powers the Mate XT 2 tri-fold — Huawei's most ambitious smartphone to date.
The limits
Bernstein's analysis, per IndexBox, positions the Kirin 9050 Pro as roughly competitive with 4nm-class chips overall — but it's worth noting that no independent Geekbench Browser results have been published to verify the multicore figure. The 30% gap to Apple's A20 Pro (built on TSMC's 2nm process) remains substantial for tasks that stress the chip as a whole.
US export restrictions under the CHIPS Act, and ongoing FCC regulations covering Huawei, mean the Mate XT 2 has no path to Western markets. The Kirin 9050 Pro's performance story matters commercially only in China — and there, it is clearly working. Huawei's China smartphone share hit 23% in Q2 2026, according to Counterpoint Research, its highest level since late 2020, driven by a stable pricing strategy and the return of homegrown 5G silicon.
The bigger picture
Huawei's approach demonstrates that architectural innovation can partially compensate for being cut off from leading-edge fabs. But "partially" is the operative word. Apple's transition to 2nm gives it a structural advantage that DUV-based manufacturing cannot close through architecture alone. For anyone outside China, the Kirin 9050 Pro is a fascinating data point — and nothing more. Huawei's Pura X View and other recent hardware similarly remain China-first launches with no confirmed global rollout.
