It appears that China has a lot of catching up to do in the CPU segment. A Chinese YouTuber (via Tom’s Hardware) has gotten her hands on a desktop PC with Huawei’s new 8-core, ARM-based Kunpeng 920 processor, which is built on a 7 nm process, but she didn’t have a great experience with it. One of the major problems is that the chip only supports China’s UOS operating system, which has terrible app support.
“The narrator commented that the UOS operating system runs smooth and has an intuitive interface, and it even supports a 4K resolution at 60Hz via a Yeston RX550 graphics card,” wrote Tom’s Hardware. “Still, she had to pay an extra 800 Yuan (~$115) to gain access to the app store. Moreover, the store had a woeful selection of applications, lacking such staples as Adobe and other apps. That’s exacerbated by the system’s lack of support for 32-bit software.”
The Kunpeng 920’s performance isn’t impressive, either, as it took the processor 11 minutes and 47 seconds to complete Blender’s BMW benchmark. Actually, that’s straight-up embarrassing, since AMD’s 8C/16T Ryzen 7 3700X can blow through that in less than 3 minutes. Huawei’s CPU also had trouble with local video playback due to poor encoding performance.