Huawei is selling US$billions in servers and cloud services. Almost all are dependent on Intel processors, a dangerous situation. HiSilicon has been making network processors for years and will unleash a killer chip on Sept 29.
The 64 processors in the Kunpeng 920 will solve that problem. The performance should be comparable to Intel or AMD’s best, according to some early benchmarks.
The board was announced in April and isn’t new. Until now, it has been little known outside the company. It uses ARM cores, which have an attractive performance per watt compared to Intel.
Sept 19, Taishan & Kunpeng will come out to the world at Huawei’s Shanghai event. Hou Jinlong, President, Cloud & AI Products & Services, will keynote with Leading New Computing with Kunpeng. He will be followed by CEOs and other senior executives from China’s top companies.
The Huawei-ARM connection is complicated. Huawei already has longterm licenses for many ARM cores. If the US maintains the boycott, ARM is forbidden to sell certain new designs to Huawei.
Huawei is prepared. It has reverse-engineered the ARM design and could switch to its own version if necessary.
Intel$20B server chip business is endangered by the boycott.