By Josh Perry, Editor
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Chinese telecommunications and electronics giant Huawei recently revealed its latest chipset, the Kunpeng 920, which is ARM-based and designed to enhance the performance of servers and cloud computing.

William Xu, Director of the Board and Chief Strategy Marketing Officer of Huawei unveils industry's highest-performance ARM-based CPU called Kunpeng 920. (Huawei Technologies)

The new chip is part of the company’s plan to become one of the world’s top five companies in cloud computing, according to a report from CNBC.

Huawei used a cutting-edge 7 nanometer manufacturing process to build the Kunpeng 920 based on ARMv8 architecture. According to the press release, the chip has optimized branch prediction algorithms, increased number of OP units, and improved 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,” the release continued. “At the same time, power efficiency is 30% better than that offered by industry counterparts. Kunpeng 920 provides much higher computing performance for data centers while slashing power consumption.”

The chip uses 64 cores at a frequency of 2.6 GHz, integrates an eight-channel DDR4, and provides 46 percent more memory bandwidth than other chips. It supports PCIe 4.0 and CCIX interfaces at 640 Gbps total bandwidth and its single-slot speed is double previous iterations.

In addition to the chip, Huawei also revealed its TaiShan series of servers powered y the Kunpeng 920. There are three models of the server, one for storage, one for high-density, and one that balances both.

“TaiShan will enable computing platforms with high performance and low power consumption for enterprises,” the company claimed. “For example, in big data scenarios, the TaiShan servers are tuned for optimal many-core high concurrency and resource scheduling to deliver a 20% computing performance boost.”

William Xu, Director of the Board and Chief Strategy Marketing Officer of Huawei, said, “Today, with Kunpeng 920, we are entering an era of diversified computing embodied by multiple cores and heterogeneity. Huawei has invested patiently and intensively in computing innovation to continuously make breakthroughs. We will work with our customers and partners to build a fully connected, intelligent world."

As noted in the article by CNBC and a feature from ZDNet.com, Huawei is releasing its new chip in the face of political challenges, including the arrest of CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada and accusations by the U.S. government and others that its equipment can be used by the Chinese government to spy on citizens.

The CNBC article noted, “Huawei makes most of its money from selling telecommunications equipment. But it is searching for new avenues of growth such as consumer electronics and cloud computing. Huawei is hoping the TaiShan servers will help boost the latter business.”