Upcoming Kirin PC chip supposedly trades blows with Apple M3

While the recently unveiled Kirin 9010 isn't topping benchmark charts soon, it proves that Huawei hasn't checked out of the mobile SoC market yet. The company also periodically launches Kirin-branded laptop chips, although the last one (Kirin 9006C) didn't make much of a splash. However, its successor could bring the fight to Apple, Intel and AMD, a new rumour from Weibo claims.

Fixed Focus Digital has revealed the specs of an upcoming Kirin PC chip. It will pack 8 Taishan v130 performance cores, and an Adreno 920 GPU. Performance-wise, 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 does not have access to cutting-edge nodes from TSMC. Lastly, it supports up to 32 GB of memory and 1 TB 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.