Huawei was previously rumored to be developing an Apple M1 competitor to take that ARM-based chipset market share away from the company. However, according to the latest information, the Chinese firm is using the Taishan V130 architecture to mass produce a silicon that can come close to the M3’s multi-core performance. It appears that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite is not the only one trying to carve out a piece of the pie.
New Kirin PC Chip could be divided into more powerful variants, similar to Apple’s ‘Pro’ and ‘Max’ versions, claims tipster
The exact name of the chip was not provided by Weibo tipster Fixed Focus Digital, as he refers to it as the ‘Kirin PC Chip.’ Regardless, he states that apart from achieving multi-core performance close to the M3, the unnamed Huawei SoC has a Mali-920 graphics processor close to the M2 GPU’s capabilities. It was not mentioned which class of product this SoC will be added to, but Huawei will most likely start with notebooks first.
Additionally, this kind of architecture is exceptionally scalable, which is why the rumor claims that the company intends to introduce more powerful variants, much like Apple has done with the M3 Pro and M3 Max launches. The CPU cluster information was not highlighted, but the remaining specifications discuss a 10-channel emission, 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage. Regarding lithography, Huawei only has two options at its disposal.
The first one would be to mass produce its Kirin PC Chip on SMIC’s 7nm architecture, but that would mean that the SoC would massively lose out on efficiency attributes, resulting in lowered battery life and higher power consumption compared to the Snapdragon X Elite and M3. An alternate route is for Huawei to wait for SMIC’s 5nm production line to officially commence wafer production, with commercialization reportedly happening as early as this year.
This 5nm node is said to be used for a new Kirin chipset that is rumored to be a part of Huawei’s Mate 70 flagship series, with its performance close to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1. The tipster did not share a potential launch timeline for this Kirin PC Chip, so Huawei will likely focus on development for now. We will wait and see if the company proceeds with a launch in 2025, and as always, we will have more updates ready for you.
News Source: Fixed Focus Digital
