Huawei’s HarmonyOS NEXT-Powered Engineering Notebook Is Rumored To Feature The Comically Slow Kirin 9006C, But Software And Thermals Have Improved

The Kirin 9006C was Huawei’s 5nm SoC that powered the company’s Qingyun L540 lineup of notebooks and was introduced in December of last year. At the time, it was believed that the chipset was mass produced on SMIC’s proprietary cutting-edge manufacturing process, but a closer inspection revealed that Kirin 9006C was actually fabricated by TSMC. The same silicon is now said to be found in an engineering sample running HarmonyOS NEXT, with a rumor claiming that the SoC displays better thermals and the software has smoother animations.

HarmonyOS NEXT running smoothly on a slower Kirin 9006C could be a testament to Huawei’s efforts to bring a low-resource platform to the masses

Despite being a notebook-class chip, the Kirin 9006C’s performance is egregious, as previous results revealed that the SoC is slower than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 in Geekbench 6. However, when running in an engineering sample featuring Huawei’s in-house HarmonyOS NEXT software, a rumor from @jasonwill101 claims that this particular model has witnessed improvement in UI smoothness and thermals.

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This information suggests that HarmonyOS NEXT is a low-resource operating system that does not have several applications running in the background, leading to better temperatures. This advantage can also lead to a better overall experience, particularly on machines running less powerful chipsets like the Kirin 9006C. However, these improvements do not mean that Huawei is not focused on launching significantly powerful SoCs.

There are whispers claiming that Huawei is working on its ‘Kirin PC Chip,’ which has multi-core performance that is close to Apple’s M3. Initially, this unnamed silicon was supposed to launch in June, but currently, there are no updates regarding its arrival. Fortunately, Huawei’s HarmonyOS NEXT is scheduled to