13 ms·

Huawei Unveils High-Performance ARM-Based CPU

233 points by karimtr 8y ago

homero 8y ago
How are Huawei, Apple and Samsung beating Qualcomm so easily? Did Qualcomm just beat Intel in the mobile market and then just become complacent with patents?
- thefounder 8y ago
  One reason may be that they are better sponsored by the gov. Some kind of tech dumping.
  - Klover 8y ago
    That could only apply to Huawei if I understand what you mean.
    - god_bless_texas 8y ago
      This is one thing I can't tell if I'm being "tin-foil hatty" about. What is embedded in that processor?
      - ahje 8y ago
        That argument could easily be reversed: Why wouldn't the Chinese be worried about bugs embedded in foreign tech used for sensitive tasks like military applications? In both cases it's more a matter of trust than anything else. Since it's more about trust, having more actors on the market is a good things, as it gives more options for the rest of us.
      - natch 8y ago
        It’s also possible Huawei is getting hassled by the US because it is not susceptible to US government attempts to embed such things on behalf of the US, as some (not all) other companies might be. Like you I can’t tell how crazy this idea is. I’m open to your tinfoil hat theory too, but both can be true.
  - llampx 8y ago
    For Huawei, that's pretty much a given. Doesn't explain Apple and Samsung though. For Qualcomm, I would be surprised if their bread and butter ARM CPUs weren't mobile CPUs. Why stick with reference designs if they could tweak them or come up with higher performing ones? The Apple iPhone CPUs from two years ago are still trading blows with the latest Snapdragons. That's crazy.
    - rsynnott 8y ago
      IIRC, Apple just spends more; they have more transistors. This is a luxury that is harder for Qualcomm to afford, as their customers wouldn't put up with it.
      - mschuster91 8y ago
        > IIRC, Apple just spends more; they have more transistors. Also, Apple has a full ARM license and full control over the OS and the software that runs on it. Which means it is very well possible that they have extended the instruction set to accelerate real-world JS performance.
        scarface74 8y ago
        That was a rumor floating around - that WebKit took advantage of new A12 instructions. It wasn’t true at the time. They may have released the patch since then. https://twitter.com/saambarati/status/1049202132522479616 https://twitter.com/saambarati/status/1049202132522479616
        mschuster91 8y ago
        It's not just about WebKit. The remainder of the OS, including the graphic stack, is most likely to be optimized as hell for the A12 CPU.
        StillBored 8y ago
        There is a _LOT_ to be said for gaining a few %5 here and there improvements. Apple can both optimize their software for a very limited set of micro-architectures (a luxury that doesn't exist on android which runs on everything from tiny in order cores to larger more general purpose OoO cores) as well as optimize the cores themselves for an exact instruction sequences they determine to be critical for _their_ OS/applications/power envelope. This means their cache sizes/latency/TLBs/ROB buffers/frequency/power profiles/etc are decided not based on what generates a good specCPU score but what generates a good iOS/safari experience. Its a complete vertical integration and no one should be surprised that a general purpose kernel (linux) running a AOT/JIT'ed environment on top of an os abstraction layer (android) on top of processors frequently designed to exist in applications that aren't phones gets beaten on a phone centric benchmark. Call me when someone gets a big hadoop benchmark or dpdk results on an apple core.
  - mtgx 8y ago
    And also Qualcomm seems to have been forced into giving away all of their server chip designs to the Chinese, too: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/qualcomm_layoffs/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/qualcomm_layoffs/ That's what you get from frothing at the mouth over "entering the huge Chinese market" by giving away all of your IP and tech through coerced "joint ventures" only to later see yourself kicked out of the market and some multi-billion dollar Chinese competitors selling your tech much more cheaply. And there's this sweet irony, too: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/u-s-star-witness-in-qualcomm-antitrust-suit-china-s-huawei?srnd=premium https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/u-s-star-... If you think all of this is far-fetched, do read on Nortel and Huawei's "joint venture", which led to the demise of Nortel and the domination of Huawei in Canada: https://www.lightreading.com/nortel-huawei-kill-jv/d/d-id/628439 https://www.lightreading.com/nortel-huawei-kill-jv/d/d-id/62... https://www.assemblymag.com/blogs/14-assembly-blog/post/90631-did-outsourcing-and-corporate-espionage-kill-nortel https://www.assemblymag.com/blogs/14-assembly-blog/post/9063... https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223272/cisco-subnet/60-minutes-torpedoes-huawei-in-less-than-15-minutes.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223272/cisco-subnet/60... That's not to downplay the idiocy of Qualcomm's board and leadership, which also played a huge role in all of this, as well as Qualcomm being involved in multiple antitrust lawsuits. The board and leadership should have been fired at least two years ago. They allowed their greed to stay in the way of the company's technical progress and decided to make money from bullying other companies instead of continuing to improve their products (most of which are just rehashed stock Arm designs these days).
    - entity345 8y ago
      Nortel didn't disappear because of Huawei. Chinese are used as scapegoats for everything these days. I used to work for Nortel and they went the way of the dodo because they were like Nokia (which ended the same way. I worked with them at some point as well...): Too bureaucratic, too slow, not hungry anymore, poor management. For their last CEO they ended up paying $12 million to Motorola because that guy breached the non-competition agreement he had when he took the job at Nortel... Just an example.
      - 8y ago
  - showbufire 8y ago
    Huawei have contracts from the govt just like lots of the American tech companies. And speaking of govt sponsorship, Samsung is definitely one of them, if you know the history about memory chips competition and how they become one of the monopolies.
    - tooltalk 8y ago
      Samsung, a monopoly? I don't know why anyone would say that unless you are a mainlander Chinese/Taiwanese. And what gov't contracts? Unlike what China is doing today, there was no such overt protectionist gov't policies implemented here. Much of the demand for tech products and R&D were driven by the cold war between the WW2 and the fall of Berlin Wall. The stylized fact that there are now fewer than a few US memory makers, namely Micron and Intel, from two dozens in the 70's and 80's demonstrates how little the gov't contract has done to "protect" the industry. China's policy of forcing foreign companies to give up their IP for access to domestic market and seeding unlimited gov't subsidy is based on the Japanese model in the 80's. Their model however fell apart as Japan's economy declined and the Japanese companies focused on quality, not on mass manufacturing to compete with emerging South Korean competitors like Samsung. Unlike Japan's large domestic market, South Korea had very little market of their own and was geared toward purely for export. It didn't coerce foreign companies to drop all their patent lawsuits or future lawsuit like the Chinese gov't reportedly demanded Samsung and SK Hynix last week. Needlessly to say, equating China's outright IP theft to the industry policy of the US or South Korea is a bit asinine. * Noh, "Samsung, SK Hynix: Pay fines, or drop all existing or future patents lawsuits; China demands South Korean companies to give up their IP", Hankyung Economic Times, Dec 26, 2018 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=TT&sl=ko&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fm.news.naver.com%2FrankingRead.nhn%3Foid%3D015%26aid%3D0004068207%26sid1%3D101%26ntype%3DRANKING https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=TT&sl=ko&tl... * Kang, JoonKyu, A study of the DRAM industry, 2010, MIT PhD Thesis https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/59138/659514510-MIT.pdf https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/59138/6595145...
      - ksec 8y ago
        Samsung as a whole ( Not Just Samsung Electronics ). Many Korean could have argued the other way around, because Samsung controls the government. Credit where Credit's due, Samsung's Electronics R&D is absolutely one of the best on the planet. But it doesn't clear them as being clean.
- samfisher83 8y ago
  They really aren't. You should read anandtech article about sd vs exynos. The exynos kills sd in geek bench but in real life performance sd does better. The issue is these things are in tiny enclosures. They will just start throttling after a while. In this case it's a server chip so it's a little different.
- baybal2 8y ago
  Qualcomm's only real advantage as a company is killer patent portfolio, and lobbying power to sue every competitor out of the market. There were 10 mainstream Smartphone SoC available on the open market during 3g era, but only 2 in 4g (Mediatek and Qualcomm, with Samsung being out of competition due to their non-compete treaty with Qualcomm.) It is only because Qualcomm can't go against Mediatek on its home soil, they went after their channel, and clients in courts. I believe that Huawei's decision to home source its own SoC was also in part dictated by them being afraid of channel risk (i.e. Mediatek going down to lawsuit, or the civil war restarting) BTW, if anybody remembers the company called Allwinner that was all the rage during tablet boom. I have 100% certain info that they too got into secret non-compete with Qualcomm in exchange for distribution rights of their low-end chips for 10 years.
  - homero 8y ago
    And there's Broadcomm who simply vanished after 3G
  - tooltalk 8y ago
    First, wasn't Infineon always on the 3G/4G scene? > It is only because Qualcomm can't go against Mediatek on its home soil, they went after their channel, and clients in courts. Qualcomm, or wireless patent holders in general, never go after component makers; as a long-held industry practice, they always go after the handset makers for maximum royalty. That practice has been upheld by regulators around the world -- though there is a lawsuit by the FTC to change that at Apple's behest now. This also presumably allows new entrants to enter the wireless chip business and, therefore, increase competition. Qualcomm further is not exactly known for lawsuits, though it always seems to be fighting regulators around the world. It reportedly initiated fewer than 3 lawsuits in the past two years -- now compared to Apple's 90+ pending lawsuits.
    - baybal2 8y ago
      > First, wasn't Infineon always on the 3G/4G scene? No, plainly speaking. There was never was a real SoC from them. Intel bought an already dead business from Infineon. > Qualcomm, or wireless patent holders in general, never go after component makers; as a long-held industry practice, they always go after the handset makers for maximum royalty. No, anybody with a real business, and not living off patent trolling will not do that, and did not do that. Only QCM really have no head on their shoulders there to risk everything in a retaliatory lawsuit every time. > That practice has been upheld by regulators around the world No, completely not the case. I worked in electronics business for close to 12 years now, and I know few things about how patent law actually works in real world. Qualcomm was show to the door great many times by courts during their peak patent trolling a decade ago, in I think more than 10 countries.
jotm 8y ago
Hmm, I feel like I've read this before. Oh right, the HiSilicon K3V2, which at the time was touted as the fastest ARM CPU for mobile devices. Except in real usage it was downclocked ~40% (including the memory) to keep temperatures low (still overheated) and the GPU performance was underwhelming. Really nice chip for tinkering with, no limits on any clocks or voltages, you could do anything you wanted with it.
- arghwhat 8y ago
  No you haven't. HiSilicon K3V2 is a 6 years old mobile chipset built on ancient 40nm technology with DDR2 RAM, so like every other mobile chipset in existence, it has massive thermal issues due to non-existent cooling—even more so due to the terrible manufacturing process. This is a server CPU built with modern processes, so thermal problems are out of the way.
  - jotm 8y ago
    https://www.engadget.com/2012/02/26/huawei-adds-home-grown-k3v2-quad-core-mobile-cpu-to-its-arsenal/ https://www.engadget.com/2012/02/26/huawei-adds-home-grown-k... I'm not dissing on the new chip, it's just that everyone claims their brand new silicon has the highest performance to date in their press releases.
    - arghwhat 8y ago
      And, well, they're usually right at the time of release. You can't blame them for wanting to market that they have the best specs at the time.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
tumetab1 8y ago
This title is misleading, should be "Huawei claims to unveil Industry's Highest-Performance ARM-Based CPU"
- arghwhat 8y ago
  Well, they probably do have the title for now. What they have done is interesting, even if marketing had to smear it.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    I dunno. Fujitsu's A64FX has incredible specifications. Fujitsu's A64FX is 7nm-class, and has those SVE extensions for incredible throughput. It is expected to be in several supercomputers soon. I expect that the A64FX is the fastest ARM in the world.
    - arghwhat 8y ago
      The Huawei specs are still a bit to limited for a full comparison, but it does use the same process. The big questions involve how Huawei's 8 DDR4 channels compare to Fujitsu's 4 HBM2 banks, how Huawei's 64 cores compare to Fujitsu's 48. Even if their IP is worse, they seem to have brute-forced their way to the top.
- detaro 8y ago
  Does it really need pointing out that a headline on huawai.com is a claim by Huawai?
  - acdha 8y ago
    It's less that it's a claim by Huawei and more that the claims haven't been verified independently. Competitive benchmarking has a long history of results which are hard to reproduce and comparisons which “accidentally” left the competing product in an unusual state, so it's prudent to distrust them until they can be verified independently.
floatboth 8y ago
> Based on the TaiShan servers, Huawei Butt also provides elastic butt services Looking at huaweicloud.com, the "elastic cloud" servers seem to be all Intel :(
- beatgammit 8y ago
  Looks like someone uses "cloud to butt" extension...
  - floatboth 8y ago
    Of course. What, some people still don't use it?
phkahler 8y ago
Huawei is also a Gold member of the RISC-V Foundation: https://riscv.org/membership/1745/huawei/ https://riscv.org/membership/1745/huawei/ As another potential threat to ARM, here is an ARM licensee that designs their own chips and is interested in RISC-V. It's not a problem today, but if interest in the ISA continues to grow it should be relatively easy for them to switch.
- stefan_ 8y ago
  Switch??? There seems to be some widespread confusion what RISC-V is, currently. It is not remotely competitive with any ARM processors, and for those used in smartphones, there is no indication it will be for at least another 10 years. It is solely used in applications where the choice of processor is mostly meaningless and cutting out ARM is 20 cents saved on the BoM. Remember Huawei makes a long long list of products besides smartphones such as networking gear where you need the occasional small to medium sized processor.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    > It is not remotely competitive with any ARM processors It is absolutely competitive with cores at the same gate count. That goes beyond stuff like RPi level cores. > and for those used in smartphones, there is no indication it will be for at least another 10 years. I mean, shitting out a new high perf uarch isn't the easiest thing in the world, but you're literally commenting on an article from Huawei claiming that they had. And now Moore's law is more or less mined out, which means it's no longer a Sisyphean task to chase the perf dragon.
    - audunw 8y ago
      > It is absolutely competitive with cores at the same gate count. That goes beyond stuff like RPi level cores. He may also have been thinking about things like toolchains and debugging tools. There are several professional IDEs geared towards ARM embedded development
      - 8y ago
alexnewman 8y ago
was this fabbed at global foundries?
- andor 8y ago
  "Using the cutting-edge 7nm process, the CPU was independently designed by Huawei based on ARMv8 architecture license" I assume it's the same 7nm TSMC process as for the Kirin 980.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- hajile 8y ago
  TSMC. Global Foundries basically gave up on smaller processes a few months ago.
- kingosticks 8y ago
  GF stopped working on their 7nm process and it wasn't used by any clients. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13277/globalfoundries-stops-all-7nm-development https://www.anandtech.com/show/13277/globalfoundries-stops-a...
- ksec 8y ago
  What makes you think it has a link to GF? Just wondering.
stevespang 8y ago
Imagine all the spyware firmware in that chip ?
akmittal 8y ago
Is it better than apple A12?
- Aaargh20318 8y ago
  Define 'better'. This thing has 64 cores vs. 4+4 on the A12X (and 2+4 on the A12). It's built for a different use-case. I guess you could benchmark the performance of a single core and compare those, but this won't power any mobile equipment and I bet it gets hot too.
- simonh 8y ago
  It's like comparing a BMW truck to an Audi sports car. Better at what?
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    s/BMW/MAN
  - Skunkleton 8y ago
    What sorts of lap times can you expect from a Mercedes panel van at the nurburgring? How much can an Aventador tow? These are the sorts of questions answered by benchmarks.
- sliken 8y ago
  It has 8 memory channels, the A12 has 2. So it's definitely targeted at a different segment. The top of the line Intel Xeon has 6 memory channnels and the top of the line AMD Epyc has 8 channels.
thecompilr 8y ago
From the only number I see, the specint score, it is 40% faster than Qualcomm Centriq socket vs socket, and even 6% core vs core. Which is a really great if true. Wonder what the power draw on that thing though.
Zigurd 8y ago
Huawei is in the game, for sure. Also, comments that dismiss Chinese achievements appear uninformed of the level of effort at technology supremacy under way in China. BUT there are a few "buts:" As the article says "the new CPU is designed to boost the development of computing in big data, distributed storage, and ARM-native application scenarios." This isn't anything like an Apple A12, which has world-beating compute power per watt. The Huawei chip should be compared to Intel server CPUs and ARM and other chips with other ISAs designed to use in data centers. This is an important step technologically for Huawei, which will probably use enough of these chips to learn for a next generation. This is probably not a chip that will disrupt anyone else's chip business.
- zoom6628 8y ago
  One of the best comments on this. Its natural for Huawei to do this to make them, and China market in general, less dependent on foreign chips. Its also natural considering the areas in which Huawei does business - they effectively are a end-to-end supplier of telco platforms from server, beacons, mobiles. I think is very good for the world to have additional heavyweight competitors in the CPU space - especially given that its ARM based so no reasons(other than political) that other brands would not want to consider as a supplier.
gamesbrainiac 8y ago
To clarify, this is not for mobile devices, for those who want to compare it to the A12x Bionic.
- solotronics 8y ago
  This ARM server seems like a cloud compute type device to me.
- simonh 8y ago
  Furthermore it's a 64 core design, so aimed at massively parallelized workloads and high bandwidth applications, which is why they bang on about it's impressive set of interfaces. Not surprising for a company that is mainly a telecoms operation and only incidentally makes phones.
  - srcmap 8y ago
    I love to the TDP # when 64 cores are running 2.6G. Also like to know the L1, L2, L3 #. It is hard for any system company to sell CPU. Apple is only for their own use. I believe the Samsung's AP is for their own use also.
  - Mikeb85 8y ago
    > only incidentally makes phones They're the number 2 phone maker in the world...
- k_bx 8y ago
  ...except that A12x Bionic is itself comparable to desktop CPUs
  - hajile 8y ago
    Hardly. It is closer to Intel U series processors which are much slower than their desktop counterparts both in peak performance (desktops clock higher) and in sustained performance (desktops dissipate heat better). It is additionally slower in mult-core workloads where desktops have access to 30+ cores (none of them "little") and over 20x as much RAM (without even considering multi-socket systems with up to 3 orders of magnitude more RAM). Most people don't need the extra power a desktop offers, but the performance advantage over mobile systems is enormous.
rbanffy 8y ago
The announcement is available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNY4J3yCzgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNY4J3yCzgI
- diaktifkan 8y ago
  It may also be downloaded for offline consumption on NewPipe.
ksec 8y ago
Huawei also has their own Cloud solution in China, even though it is not anywhere near as big a Tencent and Alibaba's cloud. So I guess they could use those as testbed. Along with 5G Infrastructure, directly competing against Intel. And this is only the first Gen, I am sure they have more to come. Intel should never have wasted billions into McAfee. May be its next acquisition target would be Nokia or Ericsson, both at around ~30B, likely need 40B. Competition is good.

233 points by karimtr 8y ago

How are Huawei, Apple and Samsung beating Qualcomm so easily? Did Qualcomm just beat Intel in the mobile market and then just become complacent with patents?

thefounder 8y ago
One reason may be that they are better sponsored by the gov. Some kind of tech dumping.
- Klover 8y ago
  That could only apply to Huawei if I understand what you mean.
  - god_bless_texas 8y ago
    This is one thing I can't tell if I'm being "tin-foil hatty" about. What is embedded in that processor?
    - ahje 8y ago
      That argument could easily be reversed: Why wouldn't the Chinese be worried about bugs embedded in foreign tech used for sensitive tasks like military applications? In both cases it's more a matter of trust than anything else. Since it's more about trust, having more actors on the market is a good things, as it gives more options for the rest of us.
    - natch 8y ago
      It’s also possible Huawei is getting hassled by the US because it is not susceptible to US government attempts to embed such things on behalf of the US, as some (not all) other companies might be. Like you I can’t tell how crazy this idea is. I’m open to your tinfoil hat theory too, but both can be true.
- llampx 8y ago
  For Huawei, that's pretty much a given. Doesn't explain Apple and Samsung though. For Qualcomm, I would be surprised if their bread and butter ARM CPUs weren't mobile CPUs. Why stick with reference designs if they could tweak them or come up with higher performing ones? The Apple iPhone CPUs from two years ago are still trading blows with the latest Snapdragons. That's crazy.
  - rsynnott 8y ago
    IIRC, Apple just spends more; they have more transistors. This is a luxury that is harder for Qualcomm to afford, as their customers wouldn't put up with it.
    - mschuster91 8y ago
      > IIRC, Apple just spends more; they have more transistors. Also, Apple has a full ARM license and full control over the OS and the software that runs on it. Which means it is very well possible that they have extended the instruction set to accelerate real-world JS performance.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        That was a rumor floating around - that WebKit took advantage of new A12 instructions. It wasn’t true at the time. They may have released the patch since then. https://twitter.com/saambarati/status/1049202132522479616 https://twitter.com/saambarati/status/1049202132522479616
        mschuster91 8y ago
        It's not just about WebKit. The remainder of the OS, including the graphic stack, is most likely to be optimized as hell for the A12 CPU.
        StillBored 8y ago
        There is a _LOT_ to be said for gaining a few %5 here and there improvements. Apple can both optimize their software for a very limited set of micro-architectures (a luxury that doesn't exist on android which runs on everything from tiny in order cores to larger more general purpose OoO cores) as well as optimize the cores themselves for an exact instruction sequences they determine to be critical for _their_ OS/applications/power envelope. This means their cache sizes/latency/TLBs/ROB buffers/frequency/power profiles/etc are decided not based on what generates a good specCPU score but what generates a good iOS/safari experience. Its a complete vertical integration and no one should be surprised that a general purpose kernel (linux) running a AOT/JIT'ed environment on top of an os abstraction layer (android) on top of processors frequently designed to exist in applications that aren't phones gets beaten on a phone centric benchmark. Call me when someone gets a big hadoop benchmark or dpdk results on an apple core.
- mtgx 8y ago
  And also Qualcomm seems to have been forced into giving away all of their server chip designs to the Chinese, too: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/qualcomm_layoffs/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/10/qualcomm_layoffs/ That's what you get from frothing at the mouth over "entering the huge Chinese market" by giving away all of your IP and tech through coerced "joint ventures" only to later see yourself kicked out of the market and some multi-billion dollar Chinese competitors selling your tech much more cheaply. And there's this sweet irony, too: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/u-s-star-witness-in-qualcomm-antitrust-suit-china-s-huawei?srnd=premium https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-04/u-s-star-... If you think all of this is far-fetched, do read on Nortel and Huawei's "joint venture", which led to the demise of Nortel and the domination of Huawei in Canada: https://www.lightreading.com/nortel-huawei-kill-jv/d/d-id/628439 https://www.lightreading.com/nortel-huawei-kill-jv/d/d-id/62... https://www.assemblymag.com/blogs/14-assembly-blog/post/90631-did-outsourcing-and-corporate-espionage-kill-nortel https://www.assemblymag.com/blogs/14-assembly-blog/post/9063... https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223272/cisco-subnet/60-minutes-torpedoes-huawei-in-less-than-15-minutes.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2223272/cisco-subnet/60... That's not to downplay the idiocy of Qualcomm's board and leadership, which also played a huge role in all of this, as well as Qualcomm being involved in multiple antitrust lawsuits. The board and leadership should have been fired at least two years ago. They allowed their greed to stay in the way of the company's technical progress and decided to make money from bullying other companies instead of continuing to improve their products (most of which are just rehashed stock Arm designs these days).
  - entity345 8y ago
    Nortel didn't disappear because of Huawei. Chinese are used as scapegoats for everything these days. I used to work for Nortel and they went the way of the dodo because they were like Nokia (which ended the same way. I worked with them at some point as well...): Too bureaucratic, too slow, not hungry anymore, poor management. For their last CEO they ended up paying $12 million to Motorola because that guy breached the non-competition agreement he had when he took the job at Nortel... Just an example.
    - 8y ago
- showbufire 8y ago
  Huawei have contracts from the govt just like lots of the American tech companies. And speaking of govt sponsorship, Samsung is definitely one of them, if you know the history about memory chips competition and how they become one of the monopolies.
  - tooltalk 8y ago
    Samsung, a monopoly? I don't know why anyone would say that unless you are a mainlander Chinese/Taiwanese. And what gov't contracts? Unlike what China is doing today, there was no such overt protectionist gov't policies implemented here. Much of the demand for tech products and R&D were driven by the cold war between the WW2 and the fall of Berlin Wall. The stylized fact that there are now fewer than a few US memory makers, namely Micron and Intel, from two dozens in the 70's and 80's demonstrates how little the gov't contract has done to "protect" the industry. China's policy of forcing foreign companies to give up their IP for access to domestic market and seeding unlimited gov't subsidy is based on the Japanese model in the 80's. Their model however fell apart as Japan's economy declined and the Japanese companies focused on quality, not on mass manufacturing to compete with emerging South Korean competitors like Samsung. Unlike Japan's large domestic market, South Korea had very little market of their own and was geared toward purely for export. It didn't coerce foreign companies to drop all their patent lawsuits or future lawsuit like the Chinese gov't reportedly demanded Samsung and SK Hynix last week. Needlessly to say, equating China's outright IP theft to the industry policy of the US or South Korea is a bit asinine. * Noh, "Samsung, SK Hynix: Pay fines, or drop all existing or future patents lawsuits; China demands South Korean companies to give up their IP", Hankyung Economic Times, Dec 26, 2018 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=TT&sl=ko&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fm.news.naver.com%2FrankingRead.nhn%3Foid%3D015%26aid%3D0004068207%26sid1%3D101%26ntype%3DRANKING https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&tab=TT&sl=ko&tl... * Kang, JoonKyu, A study of the DRAM industry, 2010, MIT PhD Thesis https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/59138/659514510-MIT.pdf https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/59138/6595145...
    - ksec 8y ago
      Samsung as a whole ( Not Just Samsung Electronics ). Many Korean could have argued the other way around, because Samsung controls the government. Credit where Credit's due, Samsung's Electronics R&D is absolutely one of the best on the planet. But it doesn't clear them as being clean.
samfisher83 8y ago
They really aren't. You should read anandtech article about sd vs exynos. The exynos kills sd in geek bench but in real life performance sd does better. The issue is these things are in tiny enclosures. They will just start throttling after a while. In this case it's a server chip so it's a little different.
baybal2 8y ago
Qualcomm's only real advantage as a company is killer patent portfolio, and lobbying power to sue every competitor out of the market. There were 10 mainstream Smartphone SoC available on the open market during 3g era, but only 2 in 4g (Mediatek and Qualcomm, with Samsung being out of competition due to their non-compete treaty with Qualcomm.) It is only because Qualcomm can't go against Mediatek on its home soil, they went after their channel, and clients in courts. I believe that Huawei's decision to home source its own SoC was also in part dictated by them being afraid of channel risk (i.e. Mediatek going down to lawsuit, or the civil war restarting) BTW, if anybody remembers the company called Allwinner that was all the rage during tablet boom. I have 100% certain info that they too got into secret non-compete with Qualcomm in exchange for distribution rights of their low-end chips for 10 years.
- homero 8y ago
  And there's Broadcomm who simply vanished after 3G
- tooltalk 8y ago
  First, wasn't Infineon always on the 3G/4G scene? > It is only because Qualcomm can't go against Mediatek on its home soil, they went after their channel, and clients in courts. Qualcomm, or wireless patent holders in general, never go after component makers; as a long-held industry practice, they always go after the handset makers for maximum royalty. That practice has been upheld by regulators around the world -- though there is a lawsuit by the FTC to change that at Apple's behest now. This also presumably allows new entrants to enter the wireless chip business and, therefore, increase competition. Qualcomm further is not exactly known for lawsuits, though it always seems to be fighting regulators around the world. It reportedly initiated fewer than 3 lawsuits in the past two years -- now compared to Apple's 90+ pending lawsuits.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    > First, wasn't Infineon always on the 3G/4G scene? No, plainly speaking. There was never was a real SoC from them. Intel bought an already dead business from Infineon. > Qualcomm, or wireless patent holders in general, never go after component makers; as a long-held industry practice, they always go after the handset makers for maximum royalty. No, anybody with a real business, and not living off patent trolling will not do that, and did not do that. Only QCM really have no head on their shoulders there to risk everything in a retaliatory lawsuit every time. > That practice has been upheld by regulators around the world No, completely not the case. I worked in electronics business for close to 12 years now, and I know few things about how patent law actually works in real world. Qualcomm was show to the door great many times by courts during their peak patent trolling a decade ago, in I think more than 10 countries.

jotm 8y ago

Hmm, I feel like I've read this before. Oh right, the HiSilicon K3V2, which at the time was touted as the fastest ARM CPU for mobile devices. Except in real usage it was downclocked ~40% (including the memory) to keep temperatures low (still overheated) and the GPU performance was underwhelming. Really nice chip for tinkering with, no limits on any clocks or voltages, you could do anything you wanted with it.

arghwhat 8y ago
No you haven't. HiSilicon K3V2 is a 6 years old mobile chipset built on ancient 40nm technology with DDR2 RAM, so like every other mobile chipset in existence, it has massive thermal issues due to non-existent cooling—even more so due to the terrible manufacturing process. This is a server CPU built with modern processes, so thermal problems are out of the way.
- jotm 8y ago
  https://www.engadget.com/2012/02/26/huawei-adds-home-grown-k3v2-quad-core-mobile-cpu-to-its-arsenal/ https://www.engadget.com/2012/02/26/huawei-adds-home-grown-k... I'm not dissing on the new chip, it's just that everyone claims their brand new silicon has the highest performance to date in their press releases.
  - arghwhat 8y ago
    And, well, they're usually right at the time of release. You can't blame them for wanting to market that they have the best specs at the time.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

tumetab1 8y ago

This title is misleading, should be "Huawei claims to unveil Industry's Highest-Performance ARM-Based CPU"

arghwhat 8y ago
Well, they probably do have the title for now. What they have done is interesting, even if marketing had to smear it.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  I dunno. Fujitsu's A64FX has incredible specifications. Fujitsu's A64FX is 7nm-class, and has those SVE extensions for incredible throughput. It is expected to be in several supercomputers soon. I expect that the A64FX is the fastest ARM in the world.
  - arghwhat 8y ago
    The Huawei specs are still a bit to limited for a full comparison, but it does use the same process. The big questions involve how Huawei's 8 DDR4 channels compare to Fujitsu's 4 HBM2 banks, how Huawei's 64 cores compare to Fujitsu's 48. Even if their IP is worse, they seem to have brute-forced their way to the top.
detaro 8y ago
Does it really need pointing out that a headline on huawai.com is a claim by Huawai?
- acdha 8y ago
  It's less that it's a claim by Huawei and more that the claims haven't been verified independently. Competitive benchmarking has a long history of results which are hard to reproduce and comparisons which “accidentally” left the competing product in an unusual state, so it's prudent to distrust them until they can be verified independently.

floatboth 8y ago

> Based on the TaiShan servers, Huawei Butt also provides elastic butt services Looking at huaweicloud.com, the "elastic cloud" servers seem to be all Intel :(

beatgammit 8y ago
Looks like someone uses "cloud to butt" extension...
- floatboth 8y ago
  Of course. What, some people still don't use it?

phkahler 8y ago

Huawei is also a Gold member of the RISC-V Foundation: https://riscv.org/membership/1745/huawei/ https://riscv.org/membership/1745/huawei/ As another potential threat to ARM, here is an ARM licensee that designs their own chips and is interested in RISC-V. It's not a problem today, but if interest in the ISA continues to grow it should be relatively easy for them to switch.

stefan_ 8y ago
Switch??? There seems to be some widespread confusion what RISC-V is, currently. It is not remotely competitive with any ARM processors, and for those used in smartphones, there is no indication it will be for at least another 10 years. It is solely used in applications where the choice of processor is mostly meaningless and cutting out ARM is 20 cents saved on the BoM. Remember Huawei makes a long long list of products besides smartphones such as networking gear where you need the occasional small to medium sized processor.
- monocasa 8y ago
  > It is not remotely competitive with any ARM processors It is absolutely competitive with cores at the same gate count. That goes beyond stuff like RPi level cores. > and for those used in smartphones, there is no indication it will be for at least another 10 years. I mean, shitting out a new high perf uarch isn't the easiest thing in the world, but you're literally commenting on an article from Huawei claiming that they had. And now Moore's law is more or less mined out, which means it's no longer a Sisyphean task to chase the perf dragon.
  - audunw 8y ago
    > It is absolutely competitive with cores at the same gate count. That goes beyond stuff like RPi level cores. He may also have been thinking about things like toolchains and debugging tools. There are several professional IDEs geared towards ARM embedded development
    - 8y ago

alexnewman 8y ago

was this fabbed at global foundries?

andor 8y ago
"Using the cutting-edge 7nm process, the CPU was independently designed by Huawei based on ARMv8 architecture license" I assume it's the same 7nm TSMC process as for the Kirin 980.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
hajile 8y ago
TSMC. Global Foundries basically gave up on smaller processes a few months ago.
kingosticks 8y ago
GF stopped working on their 7nm process and it wasn't used by any clients. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13277/globalfoundries-stops-all-7nm-development https://www.anandtech.com/show/13277/globalfoundries-stops-a...
ksec 8y ago
What makes you think it has a link to GF? Just wondering.

stevespang 8y ago

Imagine all the spyware firmware in that chip ?

akmittal 8y ago

Is it better than apple A12?

Aaargh20318 8y ago
Define 'better'. This thing has 64 cores vs. 4+4 on the A12X (and 2+4 on the A12). It's built for a different use-case. I guess you could benchmark the performance of a single core and compare those, but this won't power any mobile equipment and I bet it gets hot too.
simonh 8y ago
It's like comparing a BMW truck to an Audi sports car. Better at what?
- blattimwind 8y ago
  s/BMW/MAN
- Skunkleton 8y ago
  What sorts of lap times can you expect from a Mercedes panel van at the nurburgring? How much can an Aventador tow? These are the sorts of questions answered by benchmarks.
sliken 8y ago
It has 8 memory channels, the A12 has 2. So it's definitely targeted at a different segment. The top of the line Intel Xeon has 6 memory channnels and the top of the line AMD Epyc has 8 channels.

thecompilr 8y ago

From the only number I see, the specint score, it is 40% faster than Qualcomm Centriq socket vs socket, and even 6% core vs core. Which is a really great if true. Wonder what the power draw on that thing though.

Zigurd 8y ago

Huawei is in the game, for sure. Also, comments that dismiss Chinese achievements appear uninformed of the level of effort at technology supremacy under way in China. BUT there are a few "buts:" As the article says "the new CPU is designed to boost the development of computing in big data, distributed storage, and ARM-native application scenarios." This isn't anything like an Apple A12, which has world-beating compute power per watt. The Huawei chip should be compared to Intel server CPUs and ARM and other chips with other ISAs designed to use in data centers. This is an important step technologically for Huawei, which will probably use enough of these chips to learn for a next generation. This is probably not a chip that will disrupt anyone else's chip business.

zoom6628 8y ago
One of the best comments on this. Its natural for Huawei to do this to make them, and China market in general, less dependent on foreign chips. Its also natural considering the areas in which Huawei does business - they effectively are a end-to-end supplier of telco platforms from server, beacons, mobiles. I think is very good for the world to have additional heavyweight competitors in the CPU space - especially given that its ARM based so no reasons(other than political) that other brands would not want to consider as a supplier.

gamesbrainiac 8y ago

To clarify, this is not for mobile devices, for those who want to compare it to the A12x Bionic.

solotronics 8y ago
This ARM server seems like a cloud compute type device to me.
simonh 8y ago
Furthermore it's a 64 core design, so aimed at massively parallelized workloads and high bandwidth applications, which is why they bang on about it's impressive set of interfaces. Not surprising for a company that is mainly a telecoms operation and only incidentally makes phones.
- srcmap 8y ago
  I love to the TDP # when 64 cores are running 2.6G. Also like to know the L1, L2, L3 #. It is hard for any system company to sell CPU. Apple is only for their own use. I believe the Samsung's AP is for their own use also.
- Mikeb85 8y ago
  > only incidentally makes phones They're the number 2 phone maker in the world...
k_bx 8y ago
...except that A12x Bionic is itself comparable to desktop CPUs
- hajile 8y ago
  Hardly. It is closer to Intel U series processors which are much slower than their desktop counterparts both in peak performance (desktops clock higher) and in sustained performance (desktops dissipate heat better). It is additionally slower in mult-core workloads where desktops have access to 30+ cores (none of them "little") and over 20x as much RAM (without even considering multi-socket systems with up to 3 orders of magnitude more RAM). Most people don't need the extra power a desktop offers, but the performance advantage over mobile systems is enormous.

rbanffy 8y ago

The announcement is available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNY4J3yCzgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNY4J3yCzgI

diaktifkan 8y ago
It may also be downloaded for offline consumption on NewPipe.

ksec 8y ago

Huawei also has their own Cloud solution in China, even though it is not anywhere near as big a Tencent and Alibaba's cloud. So I guess they could use those as testbed. Along with 5G Infrastructure, directly competing against Intel. And this is only the first Gen, I am sure they have more to come. Intel should never have wasted billions into McAfee. May be its next acquisition target would be Nokia or Ericsson, both at around ~30B, likely need 40B. Competition is good.