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Huawei has been making significant advancements in its computing portfolio, as a recent teardown of the company’s latest server chip showcases impressive improvements.
Huawei’s Newest Server Chips Feature Impressive Generational Improvements, Credits to Chiplet Configuration
Huawei’s server CPUs have garnered significant market attention with the release of the Kunpeng 920, which uses a 7nm technology and an ARM-based architecture. This demonstrated the firm’s advancing position in the computing industry. Now, @Kurnalsalts has obtained a unit of Huawei’s latest Kunpeng 930 server chip and performed an extensive teardown. The teardown reveals the CPU’s chip package, memory, and I/O configurations, showcasing significant generational advancements.
Let’s start with the chip package. It measures approximately 77.5mm × 58.0 mm, a large size mainly due to Huawei’s chiplet configuration. The package consists of four different compute chiplets, each measuring around 252.3 mm², and one large I/O die, measuring about 312.3 mm². Compared to the Kunpeng 920, the successor’s IOD area is approximately 81.26% larger, primarily due to a higher 96-channel memory connection.
The CPU die measures 23.47 x 10.75mm and contains ten CPU clusters, each integrating four cores. Therefore, a single die has 40 cores, making the total core count on the Kunpeng 930 120 cores. Each die houses 91MB of L3 cache and 2MB of L2 cache. A close examination reveals that it features the ‘Mount TaiShan’ core architecture, which are ARM server cores tuned in-house by Huawei.
The I/O specifics of the Kunpeng 930 include support for 96 PCIe lanes and 16-channel DDR5 memory. It operates on a dual-socket motherboard platform, supporting dual-CPU configurations. Compared to its predecessor, the Kunpeng 930 offers almost double the core count, a significant increase in L3/L2 cache configurations, and higher SRAM density driven by the superior TSMC N5 process.
Huawei is still far from its Western counterparts, but the Kunpeng 930 could act as a viable product for domestic markets. Given that it rivals AMD/Intel options just a few generations earlier, this teardown shows us how far Huawei has come with computing advancements and suggests that the Chinese tech giant isn’t stopping here.
