Huawei - 64-Core Arm Server CPU with CCIX and PCIe Gen4 Launched

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ub4ty

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https://www.servethehome.com/huawei-kunpeng-920-64-core-arm-server-cpu/

Today Huawei announced a new 64-Core Arm Server CPU. The Huawei Kunpeng 920 is being billed as the fastest Arm CPU to date. One thing is for sure, there is going to be interest in this CPU not just for the 64 custom Arm cores, but also the I/O that the chip has onboard. We thought we would take a moment to show what Huawei is building, and why it is important.

Beyond the CPU cores and 8 channel DDR4-2933 memory controller, the company is also introducing PCIe Gen4 and CCIX support. We know that AMD EPYC Rome will support PCIe Gen4 this year (likely with CCIX), and Intel Cascade Lake will not. Like we saw Cavium do with the original ThunderX, Huawei is also integrating networking with a 100GbE RoCE NIC in the Kunpeng 920.


Huawei-Kunpeng-920-Performance.jpg


And now comes the new competition.... Good luck to anyone who isn't innovating and pushing boundaries. The standards are being set.
 
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DrMrLordX

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TSMC is a public company and aside National Development Fund and Government of Singapore (accounting for ~9% as of 2018) essentially all big shareholders are western funds and institutions. Any institution can make a move at any stock market, but so far there hasn't been any indication "PRC" is doing that.

There are takeovers, and then there are takeovers. If the PRC goes strongarm and launches a military invasion of Taiwan - an evert for which they have prepared for decades - then all bets are off. There is the very real possibility that TSMC may be the only leading-edge fab in the world at some point, if Intel and Samsung bow out of the race (or if Intel bows out and Samsung relegates themselves to specialty nodes). That will make them one hell of a strategic asset.

Huawei needs access to leading-edge fab technology, after all, and wars have been started over less.

If any of the PRCs investment arms start trying to buy up TSMC behind the scenes, I would expect most U.S. administrations to step in and try to stop it somehow.
 

moinmoin

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There are takeovers, and then there are takeovers. If the PRC goes strongarm and launches a military invasion of Taiwan - an evert for which they have prepared for decades - then all bets are off. There is the very real possibility that TSMC may be the only leading-edge fab in the world at some point, if Intel and Samsung bow out of the race (or if Intel bows out and Samsung relegates themselves to specialty nodes). That will make them one hell of a strategic asset.

Huawei needs access to leading-edge fab technology, after all, and wars have been started over less.

If any of the PRCs investment arms start trying to buy up TSMC behind the scenes, I would expect most U.S. administrations to step in and try to stop it somehow.
Imo the best way to prevent PRC attacking RoC/Taiwan/"Chinese Taipei" is exactly that reliance of big assumed government controlled companies on external companies there and elsewhere. The current attempted isolation of Huawei by the US severs those economic ties. If that approach doesn't stop but instead continues with other companies, and the reliance is not possible to fulfill internally then indeed all bets are off. At some point your scenario may well be more feasible that PRC's repeated tries at fostering globalization of its kind. But before that point PRC will try to get rid of all its US treasury bonds.

Anyway this is getting off topic.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
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True, we'll just have to wait and see what the politicians do. In the meantime, it has become . . . more difficult for Huawei to produce ARM products. Honestly I didn't expect that. You pay the licensing fee, you make the product, and then politicians tell you where you can or can't sell said product, so you sell it somewhere else. Now you can't even pay the licensing fee?

Honestly I think the most diplomatic way to go about it would be to just let Huawei keep paying the licensing fee and keep iterating on their designs. It encourages them to maintain standards with the rest of the world. It also gives Huawei/HiSilicon a chance to continue advancing the state of the art in the ARM world, which is my interest.
 

moinmoin

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Jun 1, 2017
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True, we'll just have to wait and see what the politicians do. In the meantime, it has become . . . more difficult for Huawei to produce ARM products. Honestly I didn't expect that. You pay the licensing fee, you make the product, and then politicians tell you where you can or can't sell said product, so you sell it somewhere else. Now you can't even pay the licensing fee?

Honestly I think the most diplomatic way to go about it would be to just let Huawei keep paying the licensing fee and keep iterating on their designs. It encourages them to maintain standards with the rest of the world. It also gives Huawei/HiSilicon a chance to continue advancing the state of the art in the ARM world, which is my interest.
It's obvious that SoftBank is not wanting to miss out on the licensing fees either. So the Chinese JV mentioned on the previous page likely accelerates the efforts of being able to license significant ARM IPs without the involvement of US designs.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
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Good enough. We may see more versions of this 64c chip in the future, then. I'm sure plenty of people are interested in seeing SVE/SVE2 pop up in ARM server designs.

Does the Taishan v110 core support SVE? It's based on Cortex A72, apparently, but that's all I can figure out at a glance.
 

SarahKerrigan

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Oct 12, 2014
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Good enough. We may see more versions of this 64c chip in the future, then. I'm sure plenty of people are interested in seeing SVE/SVE2 pop up in ARM server designs.

Does the Taishan v110 core support SVE? It's based on Cortex A72, apparently, but that's all I can figure out at a glance.

It's custom, not (AFAIK) Cortex-A72-derived. There's no SVE today, but the Hi1630 roadmap lists SVE (and SMT!) in the 2020-2022 timeframe, so it's clearly on HiSilicon's radar.

Of course, in the present political environment, all of that could change.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
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@SarahKerrigan

The only info I could get on Taishan v110 was this:

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/hisilicon/microarchitectures/taishan_v110

It could have some wrong bits in there.

Oops, I also see from reading more that SVE is not supported. Under the ASIMD section:

Each core features a single 128-bit NEON unit. It is capable of executing single double-precision FMA vector instruction per cycle or two single-precision vector instructions per cycle. Operating at 2 GHz, a 64-core chip will have a peak compute of 512 GigaFLOPS of double-precision floating point. It's worth noting that compared to the TaiShan v100, the throughput for single-precision vector has been doubled from 1 to 2 instructions per cycle.
 

SarahKerrigan

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Oct 12, 2014
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soresu

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Dec 19, 2014
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RIP Huawei, I won't miss you.:p(Greeting from China)

In my opinion, Huawei were on the verge of actually making Samsung a bit more honest in their insane pricing for flagship phones - and now there is little to stop them raising prices further and further, so good luck if you don't have an inexhaustible source of income.
 
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soresu

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The A76 cores are designed in Austin, Texas per Anandtech's article.

Yes with other teams in Sophia-Antipolis (France), Cambridge (UK), and the other one that co-spawned the A65/E1 design (its location is on Anandtech somewhere).

Their design teams are multi national, but I think their main HQ is still in the UK if I'm not mistaken - though very likely there is now some signifcant management in Japan too after the SoftBank acquisition.

Edit: Just looked up the A65/E1 info in Anandtech's articles, they state it was initially designed in Cambridge (UK), but later switched to a team in Chandler, Arizona.
 
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