The Kirin 9000c chip quietly debuted, and Huawei joined the Arm PC race

Titanium Media APP

2024-05-28 11:52Posted on the official account of Hebei Titanium Media APP

Entering May 2024, the PC industry has been hit by "earthquakes" one after another.

First, on May 6, the Global Times quoted news that the Biden administration of the United States further tightened export restrictions on Huawei, revoking the licenses of some companies such as Qualcomm and Intel, American chip companies, to export chips to Huawei. Subsequently, the U.S. Department of Commerce confirmed that it had "revoked some of its export licenses to Huawei."

Then, in mid-May, just over ten days later, without a press conference or press release, Huawei quietly launched a new enterprise-class host with the model of Qingyun W515x on its official website. It is equipped with a chip named Kirin 9000c, using Arm architecture, 8 cores and 12 threads, of which the main frequency of the large core is 2.48GHz, built-in TPM security chip, and the system is the Galaxy Kirin desktop operating system/UnionTech desktop operating system, which directly realizes the localization of core software and hardware.

Image source: Huawei's official website

Looking back at Huawei's development in the PC field in recent years, as well as the mobile phone business that was previously sanctioned, it is not difficult to see that Huawei has already predicted the current situation, so it can come up with products that are enough to change the pattern of China's PC market in a short period of time.

The ups and downs of the PC business

Huawei's earliest PC business began in 2009, but it is still a netbook with the characteristics of the service operator. It wasn't until the 2016 Mobile World Congress that Huawei released its first 2-in-1 computer, the HUAWEI MateBook. This product can be used as a tablet, or connected to a keyboard as a laptop, and also supports the HUAWEI MatePen stylus, which should be said to have laid the foundation for Huawei's innovative, thin and light notebook genes.

At the product level, Huawei has brought the "power button + fingerprint two-in-one" design to the industry, and Huawei Share for wireless file transfer between mobile phones and PCs, which are the "universal design" that has been used in the PC industry to this day.

Until the second quarter of 2020, Huawei's notebook shipments in China at that time were 155,000 units, second only to industry leader Lenovo (215,000 units), while other brands shipped less than 100,000 units. Then, in August 2020, Huawei released its first desktop product, Qingyun W510, equipped with the Kunpeng 920 chip.

However, Huawei was subsequently subjected to escalating sanctions by the United States, and some supply chain supply was cut off, resulting in a shortage of Huawei PCs. According to Canalys data, in the second quarter of 2021, Huawei's PC shipments in the Chinese market were only 500,000 units, a year-on-year plunge of 64%, and its market share fell to 3.4%, ranking fifth. In the third quarter of 2021, Huawei was reduced to the "other" sequence on the list of the domestic PC market.

Then, in 2021, Huawei accelerated the localization process, and in May, Huawei Qingyun L410 laptop was released, equipped with a self-developed chip Kirin 990 and a domestic independent PC operating system UOS, becoming the notebook with the highest localization rate in one fell swoop.

Subsequently, in 2022, with the gradual recovery of the PC industry supply chain, Huawei also bottomed out, and its sales gradually climbed. According to Canalys, China's PC shipments in 2022 were 48.5 million units, down 15% from 2021, but Huawei's shipments increased by 89.1% year-on-year.

2023 PC shipment statistics in the Chinese market, source Canalys

Subsequently, in 2023, thanks to the wave of domestic substitution, Huawei's PC market share in China will rise from 7% in 2022 to 10%, with an annual growth rate of 11%, and shipments will reach 3.986 million units, which is only more than 30 million units away from HP, which ranks second. So far, Huawei has completed the process of "where to fall and where to get up".

Arm chips, a new beginning

For Huawei, it is obvious that climbing up is only a phased goal. Compared with the previous Kirin 990 chip or traditional Intel PC processor, the Kirin 9000c is more like an Arm-based PC chip that benchmarks Apple's M series and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and "fights the future".

At present, the rise of Arm chips is changing the traditional PC industry pattern. Previously, Arm chips have been widely used in smartphones, tablets and other fields. Compared with traditional x86 architecture PCs, Arm architecture PCs have low cost, low power consumption, and performance, which have been verified by Apple's M series chips in recent years, and can complete high-load work. According to data from Yiou Think Tank, the global market share of Arm-based PCs has increased from 1.4% in 2020 to 12.8% in 2022, and the growth rate is very impressive.

On October 25, 2023, Qualcomm officially launched a new Arm-based processor for PCs: Snapdragon X Elite during the Snapdragon Summit. The chip uses 4nm process technology, 12 Oryon CPU cores with a frequency of 3.8GHz, and integrates Qualcomm's Adreno GPU and Hexagon NPU. According to the data released by Qualcomm, if compared with Intel's 12-core i7-1360P and 10-core i7-1355U processors, Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite's CPU performance is 2 times higher, but the power consumption is reduced by 68%.

There is news that in addition to Qualcomm, more chip companies are about to enter the game. According to Reuters, Nvidia is developing chips with Arm technology, and Nvidia has begun designing personal computer CPUs that will run the Windows operating system. It is also reported that AMD also plans to produce CPUs based on the Arm architecture, and will start selling PC chips as early as 2025.

Image source: Qualcomm official website

On May 21, 2024, Microsoft launched the new Surface Pro, which is equipped with Qualcomm Arm processors instead of traditional Intel X86 processors, and upgraded to "Copilot+PC", which focuses on AI functions.

In terms of software ecology, although the Arm architecture is just getting started, it has better versatility. The Arm architecture has common development tools with smartphones, and with the trend of more and more frequent cross-device applications, the Arm architecture is easier to break the boundary between PCs and smartphones based on the advantages of the mobile ecosystem. Yiou Intelligence Tank estimates that by 2027, Arm's share of the PC market (excluding tablets) will reach 26.7%.

Although in a short period of time, we cannot expect the Kirin 9000c chip to surpass Apple's M series and Qualcomm X Elite, but this is only a beginning of Huawei's PC chip field. In the future, Huawei is also expected to rely on its strong R&D strength to continuously improve chip performance and power consumption.

In fact, in the past few years, the sanctions against China have not been completely defeated, but have become stronger and stronger. According to the financial report, Huawei's R&D investment in 2023 will reach 164.7 billion yuan, accounting for 23.4% of revenue. It is foreseeable that under the general trend of localization substitution, Huawei is expected to make new breakthroughs in the PC market with continuous R&D investment and compete with international manufacturers.

On the whole, Huawei launched PC products equipped with Kirin 9000c chips, marking that Huawei has entered a new stage under the trend of localization substitution. Although the current Kirin 9000c performance may be slightly inferior, but it has taken the lead in the tide of this round of Arm architecture PC, despite the pressure from the outside, but with the advantages of independent control, R&D strength and market adaptability, Huawei PC has a lot of room for growth in the Chinese market. (This article was first published in Titanium Media APP, author | Wu Honglei, editor - Zhong Yi)

View original image 135K

• 

• 

•