Huawei's 5G modem is larger and less efficient than Qualcomm's, a teardown reveals

IHS Markit has done some extensive research on early 5G adoption using six early 5G-capable smartphones and looked inside. The teardowns revealed that Huawei ended up with a larger, less efficient and more expensive 5G chip than the competition.

Since the Kirin 980 chipset comes equipped with a 4G/3G/2G modem of its own, the Balong 5000 5G modem is added externally leaving the original 4G modem unused and taking a lot of space.

Having two modem chips on the SoC is not only ineffective in terms of energy and space, it's also costlier. Not to mention that the Balong 5000 on its own is about 50% bigger than Qualcomm's X50 5G modem and requires a surprisingly big amount of supporting memory - 3GB.

Even if we overlook these drawbacks, the Balong 5000 still doesn't support the millimeter 5G.