Here is more about Kunpeng chip from Huawei via JSch
Huawei introduces high-performance ARM-based CPU
By Ma Si | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2019-01-07 11:35
Xu Wenwei,chief strategy marketing officer at Huawei, unveils Kunpeng 920 in Shenzhen on January 7. [Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]
Huawei Technologies Co Ltd unveiled a high-performance chip for servers on Tuesday to reduce reliance on foreign suppliers such as Intel Corp, amid its ongoing push to expand presence in the semiconductor sector.
The central processing unit, called Kunpeng 920, is based on the ARM architecture. It is designed to better meet the exponentially growing demand for bigger computing capabilities in data centers while offering lower power consumption.
Xu Wenwei, chief strategy marketing officer at Huawei, said no single architecture can meet all computing demands and the company aims to move toward a more diversified computing power world.
"Kunpeng 920 is arguably the world's best high-performance ARM-based CPU," Xu said, "from the moment on, the saying that the ARM design is not good at processing data becomes invalid."
The move also marks that Huawei has joined the ranks of players such as Qualcomm Inc to challenge the dominant position of Intel's x86 architecture in server chips.
Designed on the basis of ARM architecture, Kunpeng 920 feature far lower power consumption than Intel's X86-based processors, which can greatly help reduce energy costs.
Power consumption accounts for around 30 to 50 percent of IT costs, Li Guanyu, deputy head of the informatization and software service department at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said in an earlier interview.
"As the demand for real-time data processing capabilities will surge in future, the global industry desires high-efficiency, low-energy and low-cost servers," Li added.
Kunpeng 920 said to outperform ThunderX2, Ampere by 25%
By
, 01.06.19
SAN JOSE, Calif. – Huawei announced a 7nm Arm-based server CPU it claims outperforms rivals and servers using it. The Kunpeng 920 shows the increasing sophistication of China’s largest system vendor and chip designer at a time when it’s at the center of heated trade tensions with the U.S.
The Kunpeng 920 packs 64 custom Arm-v8 cores running at 2.6 GHz. It supports eight DDR4 channels running up to 2,933 MT/s, two 100G Ethernet ports and PCIe Gen 4.
Huawei said the chip hits 930 on a SpecInt benchmark. It claimed that puts it 30% ahead in performance and 30% in power efficiency over Arm server rivals such as Marvell’s ThunderX2 and Ampere’s eMAG,
ThunderX2 and eMAG are 16nm CPUs with 32 cores running at similar speeds but using slower DDR4 and Gen 3 PCIe interfaces. The Kunpeng chip still lags Intel’s 14nm Xeon Gold which surpasses 1000 on SpecInt using only 18 cores.
Huawei has long been rumored to be working on a high-end Arm-based server CPU. To date, Arm-based chips have had little traction in data centers beyond use in appliances and storage controllers, in part due to the dominance of Intel’s x86 in server software.
For example, Microsoft’s Azure team said it was testing such chips
, but it has yet to announce any production use of them. Amazon bought Arm chip designer Annapurna, but so far has used the chips mainly as storage controllers. Last year, Qualcomm folded its ARM server CPU group to cut a billion dollars from its expenses after China failed to approve its mega-merger with NXP.
Intel is pairing
with its proprietary Optane DIMMs and adding more machine-learning capabilities to the CPUs.
, AMD announced a 7nm x86 server processor as a follow on to its 14nm version, soaking up some of the demand for an alternative to Intel.
Huawei said it will target the chips at native Arm applications and jobs such as big data and distributed storage that benefit from many cores. It announced three versions of servers that will use the chips as well as three cloud services it will offer, including a so-called Phone Cloud service.
Next page: Kunpeng proprietary to Huawei’s growing servers
The Kunpeng 920 hits 930 on the SpecInt benchmark.
Click to enlarge. (Source: Huawei)
The Kunpeng 920 adds to a large and growing x86 server business for Huawei. The company plans to continue its mainstream x86 line which it said has grown from sales of just 77,000 systems in 2012 to more than 918,000 last year.
Huawei’s processor comes at a time when the telecom giant has
to become the world’s second largest smartphone maker. Its latest handset uses its own 7nm application processor released about the same time as a similar chip in the iPhone.
TaiShan servers target applications that can make use of its 64 custom Arm v8 cores. Click to enlarge. (Source: Huawei)
Despite its prowess in semiconductors, Huawei has no merchant market plans, said a company executive.
“Since the early 1990s when we released our first chip, we have never thought about making HiSilicon a separate business…[and that remains] our long term strategy,” he said.
The news comes as Huawei is at the center of a U.S./China trade war impacting the tech industry. The company’s CFO was
at the request of the U.S. alleging a role in selling banned equipment to Iraq.
In a similar dispute, the U.S. effectively shut down operations for several weeks last year at Huawei’s smaller cousin, ZTE, after banning sales of U.S. chips to the company.
— Rick Merritt, Silicon Valley Bureau Chief,