While the recently introduced Kirin 9010 is not topping benchmark charts, it soon shows that Huawei has not yet withdrawn from the mobile SoC market. The company also periodically releases Kirin chips for laptops, although the latest one (Kirin 9006C) didn’t cause much of a stir. However, its successor could take the fight to Apple, Intel and AMD, according to a new Weibo rumor.
Fixed Focus Digital has revealed the specifications of an upcoming Kirin PC chip. It will have 8 Taishan v130 performance cores and an Adreno 920 GPU. In terms of performance, it supposedly matches the Apple M3 (multi-core) in CPU and the Apple M2 in GPU. These estimates seem a bit far-fetched because, unlike Apple, Huawei doesn’t have access to TSMC’s edge nodes. Lastly, it supports up to 32 GB of memory and 1 TB of storage.
The mysterious chip could feature two variants (Pro/Max) and launch sometime in September, presumably alongside Huawei’s Huawei Mate 70. Huawei has remained tight-lipped about the specific details of its new Kirin chips, but industry analysts say the Kirin 9000 and Kirin 9010 are built on SMIC’s 7nm-class node. For the laptop chip to surpass Apple, it will need at least a 5nm node, something that will be difficult for SMIC to achieve without access to EUV machines.
