Huawei's 24-Core 7nm Kunpeng CPU Allegedly Beats Core i9-9900K In Multi-Core Performance

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By Zhiye Liu
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Huawei takes it up a notch.

Huawei Desktop PC (Image credit: Huawei Club)

Chinese news outlet IThome received word that Huawei is on the brink if launching the brand's new desktop PC (internally known as Pangu) for the domestic market. The system utilizes a variant of the company's Kunpeng 920, which is also known as the Hi1620. The report claims that the Kunpeng 920 3211K's multi-core performance is slightly better than the Intel Core i9-9900K Coffee Lake processor.

The Kunpeng 920, which is based on Arm's Neoverse N1 (codename Ares) microarchitecture, boasts core configurations that span from 24 up to 64 cores, running between 2.4 GHz and 3 GHz. TSMC used to produce Kunpeng 920 for Huawei on its 7nm process node before cutting off all ties with Chinese tech giant due to new U.S. regulations.

The Kunpeng 920 3211K in particular has 24 cores that max out at 2.6 GHz. Huawei pairs the processor with 8GB of SO-DIMM memory, a 512GB Samsung SSD and AMD’s Radeon 520 mobile graphics card.

Huawei tailors the Pangu to government and enterprise markets, meaning the system is equipped with China's homemade Unified Operating System (UOS). User expansion and customization on the Pangu is close to zero. The Kunpeng 920 3211K is soldered to the motherboard and doesn't support other graphics cards. The UOS is cemented into the PC so you can't install Windows on it either. We suspect you may be able to upgrade the memory or SSD, but that's about it.

The purported images of the Pangu show three USB Type-A ports, one USB Type-C port and a single 3.5mm headphone jack in the front of the case. There is also room for an optical drive. The rear of the case holds four USB Type-A ports, one Ethernet port, three 3.5mm audio jacks and a D-Sub port. IThome's report states that the Pangu comes with a 23.8-inch monitor with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and 70% NTSC color gamut.

Pricing and the exact release date for the Pangu is unknown. The IThome reader only insinuated that the Pangu will launch soon.

Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

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21 Comments Comment from the forums
  • artk2219
    I would hope that something with 50% more threads would outperform something with 50% less threads in multi-threaded workloads. I'm not saying it isn't great that it has a decent amunt of multithreaded performance, I am saying that it should be doing even better, and hopefully future revisions will. Also its a shame that the PC is so locked down, but I guess it is meant for government and other high security offices where they dont want you changing or touching a thing.
    Reply
  • Jimbojan
    Intel Core i9-9900K is only 8 core, it is far cheaper to make and program, comparing to 28 cores of Huawei, there should not be any comparison. It is a wasting of time to compare.
    Reply
  • Flemishdragon
    There are already 80+ core arm server cpu's I think. Maybe it would be nice if there were pci slot cards to put on a ARM cpu, to jack into your old pc and it sees it as cpu threads for old or new apllications that use a lot of multi threading on the cpu. Probably not possible since the Intel Knight 's corner cards was something like that and just saw it as render nodes (to be used with linux) no pc threads to use in all windows applications.
    Reply
  • gg83
    What are they gunna do without tsmc? Back-port it to the 2xnm node they are allowed?
    Reply
  • Deicidium369
    gg83 said:
    What are they gunna do without tsmc? Back-port it to the 2xnm node they are allowed?
    SMIC or one of the other Chinese foundries - TSMC is Chinese as well, China allows them to think they are independent and separate.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    nothign news worthy?

    i mean fastest super computer did same thing....
    (talking the arm based one with liek 3x the amount of cores)


    more cores = better at doing stuff that actually uses them all

    wanna bet the 24 core chinese one will also beat a 8 core ryzen 7?
    Reply
  • nofanneeded
    hotaru251 said:
    nothign news worthy?

    i mean fastest super computer did same thing....
    (talking the arm based one with liek 3x the amount of cores)


    more cores = better at doing stuff that actually uses them all

    wanna bet the 24 core chinese one will also beat a 8 core ryzen 7?

    The context is about China VS USA race ... China will catch up in 20-30 years ... After that USA will be no more the super power...
    Reply
  • bit_user
    the system is equipped with China's homemade Unified Operating System (UOS).
    As mentioned in the comments of the linked article, it's not accurate to call UOS a homemade OS. It's basically just another Linux distro.

    Also, I'd imagine the system has some form of secure-boot, that prevents unapproved (i.e. non-backdoored) OS images from booting on it.

    The rear of the case holds four USB Type-A ports, one Ethernet port, three 3.5mm audio jacks and a D-Sub port.
    That's a serial port - it even says COM above it!

    So, we don't actually see any sort of monitor connection. ...except for a sort of ghostly image of what might be a 15-pin VGA connector, next to the COM port. I'm not sure what's going on with that - did someone do a poor job of photoshopping it out?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Jimbojan said:
    Intel Core i9-9900K is only 8 core, it is far cheaper to make and program, comparing to 28 cores of Huawei, there should not be any comparison. It is a wasting of time to compare.
    I don't believe an 8-core Coffee Lake is cheaper. I think the ARM cores are much smaller, which is why they can fit up to 80 of them on a die. Also, this CPU doesn't have integrated graphics, which should also help on costs. Finally, it's 24 cores - not 28.

    As for ease of programming, workloads that scale up to 16 threads should pretty easily reach 24. The OS they would use is Linux-based, so that wouldn't change in either case.

    ARM has been around for a long time, so not much difference in maturity of the toolchain or OS support.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    artk2219 said:
    Also its a shame that the PC is so locked down, but I guess it is meant for government and other high security offices where they dont want you changing or touching a thing.
    A PC made for the Chinese market will probably have some sort of secure-boot feature, limiting it to using only Operating Systems signed by the Chinese government. They've got to have their backdoors in place (and nobody else's), so they can spy on & control the populace.

    Given that, I wouldn't take one if you paid me to, no matter how upgradable it is.
    Reply