Huawei already makes the Kirin processors that power the company’s smartphones, and the company also produces a line of ARM-based Kunpeng processors for servers.

Now it looks like the company plans to make processors for desktop computers as well.

Huawei’s new Kunpeng D920S10 Desktop motherboard allows the company’s Kunpeng 920 processor to be used in a desktop computer.

The Kunpeng 920 chip is a 7nm ARMv8 processor with a top speed of 2.6 GHz that will be available in quad-core or octa-core varieties (although the server versions of the chip can come with up to 64 CPU cores.

Huawei’s D920S10 board will support up to 64GB of DDR-2400 RAM (with four slots for memory) and up to six SATA 3.0 hard drives. It also has two M.2 slots for solid state storage, and three PCIe slots:

  • 1 x PCIe 3.0 x16
  • 1 x PCIe 3.0 x4
  • 1 x PCIe 3.0 x1

Other features include four USB 3.0 ports, four USB 2.0 ports and an Ethernet controller.

At a time when Huawei faces the ongoing threat of US trade restrictions which have already caused the company to ship some Android smartphones without the Google Play Store, the ability to leverage in-house tech for computers could come in handy.

But it’s unclear what would happen if Huawei were put in a position where it couldn’t license ARM technology or Windows software. While Huawei is developing an alternative operating system that could be used on smartphones, smart TVs, and other devices, it’s unclear how much success the company would have selling PCs without Windows. There’s certainly a niche market for such devices, but it’s unclear if a global company like Huawei wants a piece of a market that small.

via Tom’s Hardware and ITHome

 

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18 replies on “Huawei’s ARM-based chips could be coming to desktop PCs”

  1. Today we understood why Huawei makes a PC motherboard. China announce it will stop using foreign PC in all its government officrs. An estimated 30 million PCs will be replaced over 5 years. Thats is a $150 billion business….. Welcome Huawei/Deepin (Hua-pin), you hear it here first. Bye bye Wintel….

  2. The only real purpose I could possibly see is so this company can advertise that their computer hardware is chinese made from top to bottom just in case the trade war intensifies.

    1. Well the chinese government has just decided to purge all foreign hardware and (nonfree) software from its offices. Like I said about creating its own markets…

  3. IDK this seems interesting, i’ve been running android as my main computer for a few months now and i don’t feel like i’ve been missing out on anything while my power bill has been astronomically low.. though I don’t understand what the PCI-E slots are for it is kinda weird to imagine building this into a gaming PC. I’ve never heard of a graphics card being compatible with Android

  4. Main problem with Huawei’s ARM hardware – is that it’s very hard to order it. Even if there is official distributor in the country and hardware you are interested in distributor’s price list. Or try find out price of this motherboard and you’ll see.

  6. interesting, trailblazing, but give this “wait and see”. its not just hardware, but real life applications, performance, support, etc

  7. I’d be interested in a Mini ITX ARM board like this, but I’m not even remotely interested in something from Huawei. Maybe Snapdragon or Exynos.

    Give me 6 SATA connectors and a PCIe slot. If it lets me run a file server with half the power consumption, I’d buy one.

    1. Same here.
      I was screaming about such a thing for ages. I think it was back in 2016, I was advocating for a mini ITX motherboard to slot in ARM SoC’s, since we had the advent of 14nm lithography and Cortex A72 processors.

      It would’ve been rocky for a couple years as companies experiment with it, and we see things popping up on it like Android, Linux Distributions, SteamOS, and maybe Windows 10S. But eventually they could’ve had great support where developers could build that and work to produce Mobile Apps and Server functions. The task of Dedicated Graphics Cards and drivers itself would’ve required several years minimum. Raspberry Pi and like SBC would’ve greatly benefitted too.

      And had they done that, both Intel and AMD would be in worse positions. So by 2020, popular x86 programs could have been ported over, and AAA-games supported too. You may had to choose between say an 8-core x86 system for legacy code, or a much more advanced/faster system with instead 64-cores. It could have shifted over how computing is done (drivers, kernel, operating system, application) and made things much more reliant on multithreaded performance.

    2. Why not Huawei? It is a decent enough processor that will roughly match the best that Qualcomm has to offer.

  8. China can theoretically create its own markets for anything if it has to by leveraging its Social Credit.

    1. It has more to do with the 1.4 billions population and anything imported cost 2x the price of the China brand. Capitalism win

      1. ya well so india also rapidly closing in on 1.4 billion, but its the manufacturing/infra ecosystem that allows them that.

        1. Not to mention India also has Bangladesh and Pakistan, the second largest developing population after India, when talking about the “South Asian” market. However, China itself is slowing down, there is still the massive populations of Indonesia and Vietnam for the “East Asian” market. That’s not even accounting for Myanmar or Phillipines.

          The current world population is roughly 7.6 Billion. The continent of Asia has roughly 4.5 Billion people. And just these nations above amount to 3.5 Billion of that population. That’s half the world !

          So you can say there’s only 1 Billion people living in Asia when thinking about Russia, Japan, Korea, Middle-East, and Islands of South-East-Asia. That’s close to the population of Africa at 1.2 Billion (and growing fast). Or the entire continent of Europe at around 0.7 Billion (and slowing). Which compares differently to the population of North America at around 0.5 Billion (slowing). Or even worse against the population of South America at around 0.4 Billion (and slowing).

          At least it’s not Australia at 0.02 Billion, or Antartica at 0.00 Billion population XD

  9. I’m thinking they should have started with a NUC-like version or a laptop (Chromebook). Not sure who their target market is with that board (inexpensive server?).

    1. It looks like this Motherboard could fit in some kind of SFF tower (Small form factor). These are usually bought for desk use in companies. People only use Office and the internet and they order them bay the bucketload. I wonder how this CPU compare to a 8CX.

    2. I can see who the target market is; developers. Not long ago Linus Torvalds was bemoaning the fact that while people had to cross-compile, ARM wouldn’t take off on the server as people liked to target what they were running on their development machines. This makes a lot of sense: desktop form factor for a server chip… develop locally and deploy on the same machine architecture. And a Raspberry Pi just don’t cut it! I’d buy one! ARM on the desktop looks like it may have arrived…

    3. The advantage is for running Linux with less power. (Mostly for clustering)

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