Although the recently released Kirin 9010 isn’t expected to top benchmark charts anytime soon, it does demonstrate that Huawei is still active in the mobile SoC industry. The business also occasionally releases laptop processors with the Kirin brand; however, the Kirin 9006C wasn’t very well-received. However, a recent Weibo rumor suggests that its successor may take on Apple, Intel, and AMD.
In terms of performance, Fixed Focus Digital has leaked the specifications of an upcoming Kirin PC chip that will include an Adreno 920 GPU and eight Taishan v130 performance cores. These estimates seem a little optimistic, given that Huawei, unlike Apple, does not have access to TSMC’s state-of-the-art nodes. Additionally, the chip supports up to 32 GB of memory and 1 TB of storage.
The mystery chip could feature two (Pro/Max) variants and launch sometime in September, presumably alongside the Huawei Mate 70 series. Huawei has been tight-lipped about the specifics of its new Kirin chips, but industry analysts state the Kirin 9000s and Kirin 9010 are made on a 7 nm class node from SMIC. For the laptop chip to beat Apple, it will require at least a 5 nm node, something that will be difficult for SMIC to pull off without access to EUV machines.
