Huawei unveiled the Kirin 9050 Pro chip on September 7 as part of its Mate XT 2 smartphone, the second generation of Huawei's triple-foldable phone. The Mate XT 2 is available in China for 19,999 to 24,999 yuan (about 2,400 to 3,000 euros). This chip marks a significant innovation for Huawei, as it is the first built using the "Tau scaling law," a concept introduced in May by He Tingbo, head of HiSilicon, during an IEEE event in Shanghai. Traditionally, chip performance has been improved by shrinking transistors, a process that requires advanced EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography machines. However, due to U.S. sanctions, Huawei cannot access these machines. Instead, its foundry, SMIC, has developed an N+3 process using DUV (deep ultraviolet) lithography, repeating the process multiple times. Last year’s Kirin 9030 Pro had a transistor density of 155 million per square millimeter, while the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 from Qualcomm has nearly double that. To overcome this challenge, Huawei has adopted a new approach called "LogicFolding," which involves stacking different parts of the chip—logic, analog, and memory—on two active layers within the same chip. These layers are connected using a low-temperature hybrid bonding process, reducing the distance signals need to travel, which in turn reduces energy consumption. According to Huawei’s updated scientific paper published in July, the Kirin 9050 Pro achieves a transistor density of 238 million per square millimeter, a 55% increase over the previous model without changing the manufacturing process. This improvement could lead to a 66% reduction in power consumption for the NPU, 58% for the GPU, and 41% for high-performance CPU cores. Huawei notes that this efficiency gain comes from reducing the voltage, not from magic. The Maleoon GPU in the Kirin 9050 Pro has doubled its computing units and cache, enabling hardware ray tracing at up to 50 million rays per second and claims an additional 142% increase in rendering performance. The Da Vinci NPU runs the Pangu 30B-A2B model locally, which is significantly more energy-efficient than a similar-sized dense model. While Huawei claims the Mate XT 2 offers 42% more overall performance compared to the previous model, these figures have not been independently verified. Last year’s Kirin 9030 Pro scored around 1,100 points in single-core performance on Geekbench 6, lagging behind chips from Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Apple. The Kirin 9050 Pro shows a 24% improvement in single-core performance and a 52% improvement in multi-core performance compared to the Kirin 9030 Pro, with a maximum frequency of about 3.1 GHz. However, the Mate XT 2 is only being sold in China, and there is no indication it will be released elsewhere. While the success of the Tau scaling law in mass production could reduce the impact of EUV sanctions, challenges remain, including thermal management, production yields, and long-term durability. Huawei plans to apply this method to its AI accelerators by 2030, but the technology's scalability is still uncertain. While the Kirin 9050 Pro may not surpass Qualcomm in benchmarks this year, it represents a shift for Huawei, offering a new path forward in chip design that the entire industry is closely watching.