
Huawei Unveils High-Performance ARM-Based CPU - karimtr
https://www.huawei.com/en/press-events/news/2019/1/huawei-unveils-highest-performance-arm-based-cpu
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phkahler
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_
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.

~~~
chocolatebunny
I've heard hardware guys complain about saving pennies. When you're
manufacturing millions of units then saving 20 cents on each of them
absolutely does matter. Obviously saving 20 cents now doesn't offset all the
other issues with RISC-V but saying it's meaningless to cut out 20 cents is
not correct.

~~~
est31
I don't think that's what stefan_ wanted to say. I think it's rather that
RISC-V isn't effective enough (yet) to be suitable for scenarios where the
main thing you optimize for is something other than cost (like heat
dissipation, power use, performance, etc). For scenarios where these things
don't matter, but cost is very important, RISC-V is the ideal choice.

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Zigurd
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
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.

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thecompilr
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.

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

~~~
simonh
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
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.

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homero
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
One reason may be that they are better sponsored by the gov. Some kind of tech
dumping.

~~~
llampx
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
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
> 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
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
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
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.

~~~
saberience
The new A12 processor comes very close in the same benchmarks to the best
desktop processors, not mobile specific or phone centric benchmarks. I don't
know why you persist in your non factual and biased comments.

"What is quite astonishing, is just how close Apple’s A11 and A12 are to
current desktop CPUs. I haven’t had the opportunity to run things in a more
comparable manner, but taking our server editor, Johan De Gelas’ recent
figures from earlier this summer, we see that the A12 outperforms a
moderately-clocked Skylake CPU in single-threaded performance. Of course
there’s compiler considerations and various frequency concerns to take into
account, but still we’re now talking about very small margins until Apple’s
mobile SoCs outperform the fastest desktop CPUs in terms of ST performance. It
will be interesting to get more accurate figures on this topic later on in the
coming months."

[https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-
re...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13392/the-iphone-xs-xs-max-review-
unveiling-the-silicon-secrets/4)

~~~
StillBored
"we see that the A12 outperforms a moderately-clocked Skylake CPU in single-
threaded performance"

moderately clocked skylake != "best desktop processors"

There is a good 2x perf difference between a 2 something Ghz skylake and a
4.5Ghz skylake, particularly on L2 cache bound single thread benchmarks (which
is what specint2006 is these days, its more a cache benchmark except for
libquantum which is "broken" and more accurately reflects clockrate*cores). A
moderately clocked skylake is a laptop.

But you say, IPC matters!!! Sure it does, but a microarch with the same IPC
and the ability to clock 2x faster is generally a 2x faster CPU.

Nor is apple shipping a phone with 16+ cores...

People have been saying their phones were as fast as their desktops for years,
and its not anymore true today than it was 5 years ago. Its questionable
whether it will really ever happen as there is this heat/power dissipation
problem in phones that desktops don't have. Not to mention desktops don't have
nearly the physical constraints on RAM/storage/IO capacity you find in a
phone/laptop.

------
ksec
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.

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rbanffy
The announcement is available on
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNY4J3yCzgI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNY4J3yCzgI)

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alexnewman
was this fabbed at global foundries?

~~~
andor
_" 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.

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akmittal
Is it better than apple A12?

~~~
simonh
It's like comparing a BMW truck to an Audi sports car. Better at what?

~~~
Skunkleton
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.

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tumetab1
This title is misleading, should be "Huawei claims to unveil Industry's
Highest-Performance ARM-Based CPU"

~~~
detaro
Does it really need pointing out that a headline on huawai.com is a claim by
Huawai?

~~~
acdha
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.

~~~
paraditedc
.

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chaosite
It's a press release. They're always worded like that.

~~~
paraditedc
.

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myrandomcomment
I am not sure what industry you are in but if you go read press releases from
the likes of most of the networking companies you see all the time “bob
networking unveils the biggest flubar...” or the like as standard practice.
Heck I have had to edit some of these for technical correctness before the
marketing team puts their foot in it..

~~~
paraditedc
.

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chaosite
Where are you looking?

For Cisco, their press releases seem to be here:
[https://newsroom.cisco.com/pressreleases](https://newsroom.cisco.com/pressreleases)

I haven't looked through all of them because I'm lazy, but scrolling through
them I haven't yet found one that isn't in the 3rd person.

~~~
freehunter
And in case anyone is wondering why they do that: press releases are intended
to be used in an article verbatim. Headline and all. Press releases are
written from third person perspective because that's how a reporter would
write it.

And if you go on Google and search some text from a press release, you'll find
tons of articles using the headline and body completely verbatim like it's
their own article. This is intentional.

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floatboth
> 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
Looks like someone uses "cloud to butt" extension...

~~~
floatboth
Of course. What, some people still don't use it?

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jotm
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
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
[https://www.engadget.com/2012/02/26/huawei-adds-home-
grown-k...](https://www.engadget.com/2012/02/26/huawei-adds-home-
grown-k3v2-quad-core-mobile-cpu-to-its-arsenal/)

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
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.

