First the blaze, then the cold shower: last night Huawei presented what is perhaps the best existing interpretation of a Windows portable notebook and during the night, news arrived from the USA of a possible restriction on the sale of Intel and Qualcomm processors to the giant Chinese.
The Matebook X Pro in the 2024 version that the Shenzhen company presented yesterday in Dubai it is a true masterpiece of design and engineering: weighs only 980 grams, adopts one of the best screens in its category and according to Huawei It has superior performance to the MacBook Pro of Apple in what should be some of the Cupertino company’s workhorses, such as the export of 4K videos and the opening of multiple apps at the same time.
During the presentation of the Matebook Huawei, which loves to compare itself with what it considers its most direct competitors, showed how Intel’s Core Ultra 9 processor can be, if well optimised, faster than Apple Silicon with relatively low consumption, in fact we are talking about of 40 Watts of total TPD.
The MateBook to typing.
There are points where on paper the MateBook can play important cards, and one of these is the display: we are faced with one of the very first flexible OLEDs for notebooks, where by flexible we refer to a panel that can be folded in the lower part to further reduce the frame having the contacts on the back.
The 14.2″ panel has a body surface area ratio of 93%, has a resolution of 3120 × 2080 and is a true 10-bit panel, so not 8 bits and 2 bits made via dithering. It has a variable refresh that reaches 120 Hz, has a peak brightness of 1000 nits which also makes it suitable for color grading of HDR content and has been calibrated to reach a DeltaE of less than 1.
Although we are faced with a laptop belonging to the super portable category, weighing less than 1 kg, Huawei is so ambitious as to propose it as a workstation for content creators, hence the suffix “Pro”: the use of AI to design and simulating the particular fans allowed us to optimize the dissipation flow to the point of being able to manage an Intel H series processor, capable of working at 45 Watts in standard mode but even requiring more than 100 Watts in Turbo mode.
Configurable with 16 GB or 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory and with storage up to 2 GB, the new MateBook the absence of Wi-fi 7 should be noted, it stops at Wi-fi 6E.
The battery is 72 Wh, supports 90 Watt fast charging and there are 2 Thunderbolt ports and a classic USB-C port.
HUAWEI MateBook 2,499.00 euros for the Intel Core Ultra 9 versionand as we wrote it could be one of the latest Huawei notebooks with an Intel processor.
In fact, it seems that both Intel and Qualcomm have had their commercial licenses revoked which allowed the two American companies to sell chips to Huawei. Qualcomm was now off the radar, while Intel provided processors for laptops such as the Core Ultra 7 and Ultra 9 of this model. The news, although there is no official statement from the Department of Commerce, was confirmed by Michael McCaul, a Republican member of Congress, who said that The sale of all chips to Huawei by the two American companies that have been targeted for years because they were too close to China was blocked.
Obviously several considerations must be made: the first is that Huawei sells around 5 million laptops worldwide, so its market share is minimal and the quantity of processors it buys from Intel is very low. Surely has stockpiled enough chips to produce and sell the Matebook and other 2024 modelswhich should arrive regularly on the market.
The problem arises for the future but Huawei has learned, in recent years, that it cannot rely on American companies and that it must always have a plan B. The news of the blocking of processor sales by Intel, if confirmed, will not it is certainly a bolt from the blue, but it is something that in Shenzhen they expected sooner or later: in recent months the issue had already been raised several times, especially following the communication made by Intel which promoted its Intel Core Ultra processors such as “Chips for AI Computers”.
Plan B could be ARM: in recent months some Huawei laptops with HiSilicon Kirin 9006C chips have been announced in China and Huawei together with SMIC is working hard to increase the production of Kirin processors, necessary to cope with the surge in sales of the new ones smartphones. With the excitement around Windows and ARM in this period, and with the Snapdragon for his Matebooks.
On the other hand, Huawei compares itself with Apple, and Apple has taught that it can also do without Intel.
