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SK Hynix Isn't Sure How Its Chips Got in Huawei's New Phone
The Huawei Mate 60 Pro is a mysterious phone that should not exist.
www.extremetech.com
It's been a few years since Huawei released a phone worthy of notice stateside, but the new Mate 60 Pro has raised eyebrows on both sides of the Pacific. It's not a particularly innovative phone, but it contains chips that shouldn't exist. In addition to the mysterious Kirin 9000s processor, teardowns have revealed what appear to be SK Hynix memory and NAND flash. This would be a significant violation of US trade sanctions, but the South Korean firm says it's looking into how Huawei got the chips.
Huawei was vague about many aspects of the Mate 60 Pro's hardware, but Chinese consumers have been poking around inside the phone since it launched. Multiple teardowns show at least two chips from SK Hynix inside, a 176-layer 4D NAND chip (UD310) and 512Gb LPDDR5 modules bearing model number HN8T25DEHKX077. It has at least moved on from releasing the same phone multiple times.
As far as anyone can tell, these are authentic SK Hynix parts, but the company professes its innocence, saying that it adheres to the US sanctions. Because SK Hynix relies on US technology to manufacture chips, it has no choice but to comply. Some have speculated that Huawei stockpiled SK Hynix components when it still had limited access to US markets in 2020 (that's when the U310 was released). But if that's the case, Huawei would be severely limited in the number of Mate 60 Pro phones it could produce.