Huawei's New Tri-Fold Ships With Its First New Flagship Chip in Six Years
Huawei's Mate XT 2 launched in Guangzhou with the Kirin 9050 Pro, the first new flagship Kirin chip announced at a Huawei launch event since 2020 — and a teardown livestream that drew 100,000 viewers to inspect the silicon. Executive director Richard Yu also had a message for Apple users: buy a Huawei as your backup phone.
Huawei used a Guangzhou launch event on September 7 to unveil the Mate XT 2, a tri-fold "Ultimate Design" flagship, and the phone's silicon mattered more than its screen. The Mate XT 2 is the first device to carry the Kirin 9050 Pro, which state news agency Xinhua described as Huawei's first new high-performance chip unveiled at a flagship launch in six years — the gap dating back to the Mate 40 era, before US export controls cut the company off from advanced chipmaking.
What "logic folding" means
The chip's headline feature is what Huawei calls logic-folding technology. Rather than spreading a chip's logic units across a flat die, they are stacked in layers, with vertical interconnects Xinhua likened to adding an elevator to a two-storey house: shorter signal paths, lower latency, better performance. Tech blogger Dingjiao Digital's posts from the keynote put the GPU gain over the previous generation at 142 percent, with particular emphasis on ray-tracing performance.
Within hours of the launch, the well-known teardown streamer Yang Changshun live-streamed the phone's dissection to an audience of more than 100,000 viewers. As the screen and motherboard came apart, the Kirin 9050 Pro emerged with "HISILICON" and "Hi36E0" printed on its surface — along with the marking "2035-CN02," a designation that has previously appeared on several earlier Kirin chips and has fuelled years of speculation about what it denotes. The live autopsy of a domestic chip drew a rapt audience precisely because the chip is the political heart of the device: each new Kirin is read as a progress report on China's ability to build advanced semiconductors under sanctions. The site has followed that thread closely, from Huawei quietly certifying its next flagship as a 5G phone to DeepSeek's order for 160,000 Huawei AI chips.
The pitch to Apple users
Richard Yu, who leads Huawei's consumer business, spent part of the HarmonyOS 7 event on a different front. Introducing the Pura X View, a wide-format "straight bar" phone, he noted that it interoperates with the iPhone on file formats — and then went further. "Apple users can buy one of our wide-format phones as a backup," he said. "Use it for a few days and it might just become your main phone. I have that confidence."
The remark trended in its own right, drawing both amusement and pushback. One Weibo user's reply — "You've got to be kidding!" — gathered more than 3,000 likes, a reminder that Huawei's marketing bravado splits domestic opinion even among people who follow the company closely.
The launch ran head-to-head with Xiaomi's own foldable and EV event the same evening, a scheduling collision Chinese tech media treated as the industry's "super week." For Huawei, though, the chip was the message. Whether the Kirin 9050 Pro's layered design proves to be a genuine architectural advance or a clever workaround for the loss of extreme ultraviolet lithography is the question foreign analysts will press; on Chinese social media, the more common framing was simpler — six years after the sanctions arrived, Huawei is still standing on a launch stage, announcing something new.
