From China comes the first Huawei desktop computer based on its own Kungpeng 920 processor with ARM architecture manufactured in 7 nm. A new PC that joins other computers with Chinese processors that we have already seen, like the Zhaoxin KX-6000 based on ARM Ryzen 2000 x86 cores, although in this case we have ARM cores, a jump that we have also seen from Apple with its Apple Silicon.
The Chinese government does not cease in its efforts to promote independence from Western processors. Thus the Huawei brand, through its subsidiary HiSilicon, which has been installing its Kungpeng processors in servers for some time now, is making the leap to the domestic sector with the Kungpeng 920 2249K processor, an Octa Core with 64 bit ARM v8 architecture that reaches 2.6 GHz and is made in 7 nm.
This on-board processor is sold in a PC with a price of 7500 Yuan which at the exchange rate would be $999. This PC includes a Huawei D920S10 motherboard with a dedicated AMD Radeon RX550 GPU (NVIDIA is not supported), 16 GB of DDR4 2666 GHz RAM in two DIMMs and a 256 GB SSD. As connectors, we have the classic ones, four internal SATA ports, PCIe 4.0 slots, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 connectors, plus triple output of HDMI 2.0 4K 60fps, DVI and VGA video.
As operating system we have the UOS system which is a very customized version of Linux ARM that absurdly only allows to install 32 bit apps. To make matters worse, the Huawei app store only allows access if we pay an extra 800 Yuan ($100), an otherwise rather poor looking store without important reference apps.
In the tests done as we see (in the video if we activate the English translation of the subtitles it’s quite understandable) we have a quite poor performance, and we’ll only be able to use the system for navigation and office apps. In the performance tests the system suffers in the demanding rendering benchs and also shows problems in 4K videos, something common in Linux ARM because of its video acceleration problems with the proprietary VPUs.
After seeing the performance and the tests done this is certainly a product for the most nationalistic and paranoid Chinese users who do not want to have a western backdoor and prefer a national one. In any case it is a first step and in the future we will see many more options and possibly better prices that will make it more attractive.