On the recent podcast 'The China Show' [1], all evidence so far points to their 5G chips that were manufactured and imported from Taiwan just before they underwent sanctions. The chip itself performs like a 2-3 year old chip. It is likely a similar story for the SMIC chip - they 100% do not yet have a 7nm process in mainland China.
I think recently China released an "Intel competitor" that turned out to be an old i3 that was de-lidded and had a Chinese name thrown on it, with the firmware reporting rewritten.
> It is unclear how many units of the new device Huawei intends to produce.
> They also suggested that Huawei may be powering some Mate 60s with chips from TSMC, which it had stockpiled before the US cut off such purchases.
You could probably estimate it based on the number of chips they were able to procure prior to sanctions. The other option they have (at incredible cost) is to buy new devices, reverse engineer them, then buy tonnes of them and recover the chips.
Put simply, the title is false. This shows that sanctions are working incredibly well.