Every Kirin Processor Explained

Huawei's founder predicted America would eventually try to destroy his company. So in the 1990s, while running a telecom equipment business in Shenzhen, he quietly built a backup. A secret chip division called HiSilicon, assembled over thirty years, designed to keep Huawei alive if Western suppliers ever cut ties. Not because he knew when it would happen. Because he knew it would.
On September 15, 2020, it happened. The US government amended the Foreign-Produced Direct Product Rule, and TSMC,the world's most advanced chip foundry,stopped manufacturing for Huawei overnight. The most ambitious silicon division in China went dark. No flagship chip for nearly three years. The world assumed it was over.
This video tells the complete story of every Kirin processor,eleven chips across three eras. It starts in 2014 with a modest quad-core that proved a Chinese company could build integrated silicon at all. It moves through the chips that delivered world firsts in LTE modems, neural processing units, 7nm fabrication, and fully integrated 5G,often before Qualcomm, often before Apple. And it ends with the chips built after the sanctions, on domestic Chinese foundries, running domestic Chinese software, carrying zero Western intellectual property.
This is not a spec comparison video. It is the story of a chip division that spent three decades preparing for a war it hoped would never come,and then had to fight it anyway.
What this video covers: why Huawei left Qualcomm and built their own silicon, how the Kirin 920 delivered a modem world first that no Android rival could match, the chip that humiliated the Snapdragon 810 while running cool, how Huawei beat every company on earth to 7nm fabrication and still lost the performance war, the benchmark manipulation scandal that got Huawei delisted from 3DMark, why the Kirin 990 deliberately used older CPU cores and why critics who called it a weakness were wrong, what happened on September 15 2020 and why Huawei stockpiled chips frantically before the deadline, how SMIC reached 7nm-class fabrication without EUV lithography and what that meant for US export control assumptions, the complete ARM divorce and the first modern flagship chip carrying zero Western CPU intellectual property, and why the Kirin 9030 Pro is 320 percent slower than Qualcomm in single-core benchmarks and why Huawei built it anyway.
Chips covered in this video: Kirin 910, Kirin 920, Kirin 950, Kirin 960, Kirin 970, Kirin 980, Kirin 990 5G, Kirin 9000, Kirin 9010, Kirin 9020, Kirin 9030 Pro.
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Видео Every Kirin Processor Explained канала Tech Explainer Guy