Huawei Kunpeng 920 Targets ‘Big Data’ Computing

Huawei unveiled a new chip, called Kunpeng 920, aimed at the data center market. The chip is expected to help reduce China’s reliance on exports of chips from American companies amidst the ongoing trade dispute between China and the United States.

Huawei Kunpeng 920

The new chip is based on Arm instruction set architecture, which has historically not been successful in the server market. However, over the past few years, multiple companies have tried to enter this market with higher-performance Arm-based chips.

Some companies, such as Samsung and Qualcomm have given up on their server chip efforts, while other companies such as Huawei, Marvell, and some new server chip start-ups have redoubled their efforts to take on both Intel and AMD in the data center.

William Xu, Huawei’s chief strategy marketing officer, said on Monday:

“The ARM industry is seeing a new development opportunity. The [new] Kunpeng 920 CPU and TaiShan servers released by Huawei are primarily used in big data, distributed storage, and ARM native applications.

We will work with global partners in the spirit of openness, collaboration, and shared success to drive the development of the ARM ecosystem and expand the computing space, and embrace a diversified computing era.”

High-Performance Arm CPU

Earlier this year, when Huawei announced the chip for the first time, the company claimed that Kunpeng 920 is the “industry’s highest-performance Arm-based server CPU.” The processor was designed in-house by Huawei and manufactured on a 7nm process.

Huawei claimed that its design significantly improves processor performance by optimizing branch prediction algorithms, increasing the number of OP units, and improving the memory subsystem architecture. The company said that the chip outperforms the competition by 25% in performance and 30% in energy efficiency.

The Huawei Kunpeng 920 comes with 64 CPU cores with a clock speed of 2.6 GHz, supports 8-channel DDR4-3200, and the company claimed it beats the competition by 46% in terms of memory bandwidth. The chip supports PCIe 4.0 and CCIX interfaces and provides 640 Gbps total bandwidth.

Huawei Taishan X6000 V2 Server

Huawei also launched the high-density Taishan X6000 V2 server, a U2 4-node server that uses the Kunpeng 920 processors and comes in multiple versions from a 32-core 2.6 GHz version to 64-core 3GHz version.

Huawei Cloud, the company’s cloud service, has also started integrating the Taishan X6000 V2 server in its offerings, which include elastic cloud services, bare metal services, and cloud phone services.