Huawei unveils Kunpeng 920 server Arm chip Watch Now

Huawei has taken the wraps off its Arm-based Kunpeng 920 chip, which the company says performs better than its competition while sucking down less power.

The Kunpeng 920 has 64 cores operating up to 2.6 GHz, has 8-channel DDR4 support, and a pair of 100G RoCE ports. Huawei said the chip offers 30 percent power efficiency over its competitors.

Across tests the company has conducted, it claims performance boosts in the realms of floating-point calculations, distributed storage, big data, and Arm-native applications.

At the same time, the company also announced an Arm-based server series called TaiShan.

The series has three models: The TaiShan 2280, a 2U base model that has 2 sockets and support for up to 28 2.5-inch NVMe SSDs; the 4U TaiShan 5280/5290 that can store up to 10 petabytes; and the TaiShan X6000 that is a 2U 4-node server that Huawei says can deliver 10,240 cores per rack.

"In big data scenarios, the TaiShan servers are tuned for optimal many-core high concurrency and resource scheduling to deliver a 20 percent computing performance boost," the company said.

"Based on the TaiShan servers, Huawei Cloud also provides elastic cloud services, bare metal services, and cloud phone services."

The company did not announce pricing or timing for its new products.

Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou is currently on bail in Vancouver following her December 1 arrest. Since that time, China has detained thirteen Canadians, with at least eight released.

The Huawei CFO, who is also the company's founder's daughter, is accused by the United States of misleading multinational banks about Iran-linked transactions, putting the banks at risk of violating US sanctions, and is due in court on February 6.

Answering questions following the launch announcement in Shenzen on Monday, company executives did not weigh into the matter, nor the increasing tensions between China and America, and instead promoted "open, global collaboration" and "joint innovation".

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