Huawei would work on a powerful Kirin chip for PC

Despite all the trade restrictions imposed by the United States, Huawei continues to manufacture its Kirin chips for smartphones. The Huawei Pura 70 series uses an upgraded version of last year’s Kirin 9000s chip. Now, a rumor from Chinese microblogging site Weibo claims that an under-developed Kirin PC chip is capable enough to match the performance of the Apple M3 in multi-core and the Apple M2 in terms of GPU performance.

Upcoming Huawei Kirin PC chip could match Apple M3’s multi-core performance

The user named “Fixed Focus Digital” (translated from Chinese) revealed some specifications of the new Kirin PC chip. It will reportedly feature eight TaiShan v130 performance cores and the company’s next-generation Mailiang 920 GPU. For those who don’t know, last year’s Kirin 9000 chip (which powers the Huawei Mate 60 series) uses TaiShan v120 cores. The architecture would be scalable and suggests the possibility of matching the performance of Apple Silicon.

In addition to the CPU and GPU architecture, the rumor also hints at the new chip’s storage and memory support. It would support 32 GB of memory and 2 TB of storage.

Speaking of the process node, Huawei has two options. One of them is SMIC’s 7nm process. Another option for the company will be to wait for SMIC’s next-generation 5nm process node, which would not yet be ready for mass production. The company will therefore have to delay production of the new Kirin PC chip.

Huawei has two process nodes to manufacture the chip.

Using the 7nm process means lower power efficiency, which is not ideal for a device running on a limited battery. In order to manage battery life, the company will have to reduce the performance of the chip. This is evident in the performance of this year’s Kirin 9000 and Kirin 9010. But then the chip may not achieve its performance target. If the company decides to manage heat with more aggressive active heat dissipation, the device may become bulkier and less efficient overall. Still, it appears Qualcomm isn’t the only company chasing Apple Silicon by focusing on Windows-on-Arm.

However, the informant did not provide any information about the process node. We’ll have to wait and see how the upcoming Kirin PC chip handles the technical challenges of trade sanctions and whether it can match the multi-core performance of the Apple M3. Speaking of the release schedule, this new chip could be released later this year, perhaps in September.

April 29, 2024