Huawei Mate 40 may feature Kirin 1020 processor, free-form camera lenses

As per the analyst, the Huawei Mate 40 series could launch sometime in September or later. However, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic may also influence the launch date.

As per the analyst, the Huawei Mate 40 series could launch sometime in September or later. However, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic may also influence the launch date. (In picture - Huawei Mate 30) (Huawei)

Now that Huawei has launched its P40 smartphones series, all eyes are on the company's Mate 40 lineup. And smartphone analyst Ming Chi-Kuo has laid-out some predictions about the handset. To start with, the smartphone series could launch sometime in September or later, which is also the regular launch time from for the Mate series. However, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic may also influence the change in the launch date.

The Huawei Mate 40 series is supposed to be powered by company's own next-gen flagship processor - Kirin 1020, which is also known by the codename - Baltimore. This may be manufactured using TSMC's 5nm manufacturing node, which is better than Kirin 990 that powers the P40 series.

However, it is not for sure if the chipset will be made using N5 process or N5P. The former is claimed to deliver up to 15% better performance than 7nm chipsets with 30% power efficiency while the latter is said to further drop the power consumption by 15%. It has been hinted that Kirin 1020 may have Cortex A77 or Cortex A78 cores.

As for the cameras, the Mate 40 may have a 'free-form' camera design, which is supposed to improve the ultra-wide camera and remove unwanted distortions and aberrations. We are talking about distortions that lead to degraded quality of image at the corners or the fish-eye effect in wide angle cameras. It will be interesting to see how Huawei implements this in its upcoming Mate 40.

Talking about cameras, Huawei P40 Pro recently beat Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max and some other handsets to lead the race in the DxO Mark tests. As per the results, the smartphone received a high score of 128, which is now followed by Oppo Find X2 Pro, Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro, Huawei Mate 30 Pro 5G and Honor V30 Pro in the sequential manner.