Bidding Strong on Cloud, Huawei Rollsout Next-Gen Chipset Tailored for Servers

Huawei lately rolled-out next-gen chipset for servers to vie AMD. The new chipset, dubbed Kunpeng 920, is tailored for data centers and will power the company’s TaiShan server, which was also launched recently.

Huawei’s new silicon, known as a central processing unit (CPU), was designed by the company and based on a chipset architecture created by ARM, the U.K.-headquartered company now owned by SoftBank .

The Kunpeng 920 is a 7-nanometer chip, a designation tied to its size. Such technology is the latest in the semiconductor industry and allows for smaller components that are more powerful and energy efficient than their predecessors.

Huawei said its new servers with the Kunpeng 920 are designed to help process and store large amounts of data.

ARM has typically been a player in mobile devices with its chipsets, but it has of late tried to push into the server and cloud market. Huawei is not the only company with a 7 nanometer chipset designed for servers. AMD has its own product that it launched last year. Huawei’s latest move puts it in competition with the likes of that semiconductor firm and NVIDIA.

It’s also not Huawei’s first 7nm chipset. The company has the Kirin 980, which is designed for its own mobile phones, and the Ascend 910, which was created to handle artificial intelligence applications run in the cloud. The Ascend 910 is also designed for data centers, but serves a different function than the new Kunpeng 920.

The technology giant has worked with Intel for many years on semiconductors for its servers, but the Kungpeng 920 is based off of ARM architecture. Xu said that Huawei will continue its relationship with Intel but it chooses the best option for each use case