Huawei introduces Arm-based CPU for big data computing tasks
Claimed to be the industry’s highest-performance Arm-based CPU, the Kunpeng 920 CPU is designed to boost the development of computing in big data, distributed storage, and Arm-native applications, says Huawei.
The company will continue partnership with Intel for the ICT industry, but this introduction allows it to work with the Arm ecosystem in the computing space.
The Kunpeng 920 is based on 7nm process and the Armv8 architecture license. It significantly improves processor performance by optimising branch prediction algorithms, increasing the number of OP units, and improving the memory subsystem architecture, explains Huawei. At typical frequency, the Kunpeng 920 CPU scores over 930 in the SPECint Benchmarks test, which is 25 per cent higher than the industry benchmark. At the same time, power efficiency is 30 per cent better than competing products.
It integrates 64 cores at a frequency of 2.6GHz and eight-channel DDR4. Memory bandwidth exceeds current offerings by 46 per cent, says Huawei. System integration is also increased significantly through the two 100G RoCE ports. Kunpeng 920 supports PCIe 4.0 and CCIX interfaces, and provides 640Gbits per second bandwidth. The single-slot speed is twice that of the earlier version, says Huawei, to improve the performance of storage and accelerators.
The development and convergence of Arm-based applications on smart terminals are accelerating, along with cloud-device collaboration, while new applications in cloud computing are driving data diversity. For example, big data applications, distributed storage, and some edge computing scenarios have specific energy efficiency requirements for many-core high-performance computing. In such a context, Arm systems offer advantages in performance and power consumption, Huawei believes.
Huawei has been working with industry organisations such as Green Computing Consortium (GCC), Linaro, and Open Edge and HPC Initiative (OEHI) to build an open, collaborative industry ecosystem, alongside partners such as Hortonworks, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SUSE, Ubuntu, and China Standard Software.
It is a core member of Linaro and a Platinum member of the OpenStack Foundation and a founding member of Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Huawei’s William Xu commented at the launch: “Today, with Kunpeng 920, we are entering an era of diversified computing embodied by multiple cores and heterogeneity”.
