Huawei Unveils Industry's Highest-Performance ARM-based CPU

Huawei announced the industry's highest-performance ARM-based CPU. Kunpeng 920 is designed to boost the development of computing in big data, distributed storage, and ARM-native application scenarios. Huawei will join with industry players to advance the ARM industry and foster an open, collaborative ecosystem.

"The ARM industry is seeing a new development opportunity. The Kunpeng 920 CPU and TaiShan servers 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," said William Xu, Director of the Board and Chief Strategy Marketing Officer of Huawei.

Kunpeng 920 is the industry's highest-performance ARM-based server CPU. Using the 7nm process, the CPU was independently designed by Huawei based on ARMv8 architecture license. It significantly improves processor performance by optimizing branch prediction algorithms, increasing the number of OP units, and improving the memory subsystem architecture.

At typical frequency, the Kunpeng 920 CPU scores over 930 in the SPECint Benchmarks test, which is 25% higher than the industry benchmark. At the same time, power efficiency is 30% better than that offered by industry counterparts. CPU integrates 64 cores at a frequency of 2.6 GHz as well as 8-channel DDR4, and memory bandwidth that exceeds incumbent offerings by 46%.

System integration is also increased significantly through the two 100G RoCE ports. Kunpeng 920 supports PCIe 4.0 and CCIX interfaces, and provides 640 Gbps total bandwidth. In addition, the single-slot speed is twice that of the incumbent offering, effectively improving the performance of storage and various accelerators.

Huawei also released its TaiShan series servers powered by Kunpeng 920, including three models: one with a focus on storage, another on high density, and a third focused on balancing both requirements. The TaiShan servers are built for big data, distributed storage, and ARM-native application scenarios. The ARM architecture is best suited for these scenarios with advantages in many-core and performance per watt.