One step ahead of Apple, Huawei released a computer running ARM self-made processor, 100% Chinese components, priced at $ 1,000.

Recently at WWDC, Apple announced that it will soon launch Mac computers running ARM processors instead of Intel processors. Today in China, Huawei is one step ahead of Apple when it debuted its first ARM-powered computer. It is also the first computer to use 100% Chinese hardware and software.

Huawei’s HiSilicon is always responsible for designing and manufacturing smartphone chips, to reduce its dependence on U.S. technology companies such as Qualcomm. In addition, HiSilicon also researches processor chips for computers and servers.

The new Huawei desktop is equipped with a 7nm Kunpeng 920 ARM v8 processor, with octa-core 2.6GHz. The chip is soldered onto the Huawei D920S10 motherboard, which supports 6 SATA III ports, two M.2 slots, two USB 2.0 and USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI. Besides, there is 16GB RAM DDR4-2666 RAM, 200W power, 256GB SATA hard drive and Yeston Radeon RX550 GPU. The computer costs 7,500 yuan (US $ 1,068).

The question now is, what is the performance of an ARM-powered computer? In response, the computer was tested with Blender Car Demo, the results took 11 minutes and 47 seconds, quite slow. Even watching videos on this computer is quite slow to touch, due to very poor encoding performance.

According to the assessment, Huawei’s computer is only suitable for light office tasks. At more than $ 1,000, it’s too expensive for such a modest performance computer. But that is not the most important issue of this computer.

The computer came with the Unity Operating System (UOS) pre-installed, instead of Windows. This is a Chinese version of Linux. The operating system has its own app store, the UOS app store, which costs 800 yuan ($ 114) to access.

But even so, the number of software in the UOS app store is very limited. Some common applications such as Adobe applications are not included in this application store. The fact that the processor cannot run 32-bit software also causes a lot of compatibility issues.

The fact that Huawei is one step ahead of Apple when it comes to the launch of its own ARM-powered computer, it seems not a wise decision. There are many issues to solve, from the performance of the ARM chip, to the limited number of supported applications. Hopefully Apple will be able to solve all of these problems when it launches its first Mac computer with an ARM chip.

Reference: Androidauthority