Huawei network switch? Then, Huawei smartphone? Well, get used to Huawei supercomputers soon.
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REVIEW
The Shenzhen giant company which, as its proponents will repeat, started without any government help - although, of course, it is well linked with it today - is, in line with their 'next IBM' strategy we unveiled here some months ago, widening its reach.
Geographically, they pretty much covered the Earth, and their componentry are bound to go beyond this planet too, in Chinese space missions. Target market wise, the telecoms (both consumer and enterprise related) markets are covered as well, with CPUs and systems markets now under the assault.
The newest arena Huawei is entering is at the very top: supercomputers. Why bother, when it rarely makes money? Well, Huawei management, according to our sources, thinks high performance computing can make money, and not just in China. There is enough differentiation to make the designs blades and other nodes more HPC optimised, both CPU and memory performance wise, and then use Huawei network and interconnect expertise to improve on the inter-system connection efficiency, where even the Infiniband leaves a lot to be wanted.
Huawei, according to our high level sources, already got a substantial system portion of some of the upcoming ultra large systems in China, including what would likely be the world's first 100 Petaflop supercomputer in a year's time, at least five times as fast as the just unveiled fastest US system two weeks ago. This includes the node board design and rack infrastructure, among others. Of course, more of the same will follow, both above and below that performance threshold - some of it likely with Chinese - even Huawei's own - CPUs.
Since supercomputers are a costly and tough to earn money market with even tougher customer support for most generic vendors like HP or Dell, it'll be interesting how Huawei will handle the challenges of high performance computing marketing, sales, integration and support. If the past is anything to go by, looking how Cisco fared trying to compete with Huawei, the Western SI vendors better beware. After all, they themselves killed off their only advantage - their own CPUs like Alpha or MIPS or HP-PA - to be left essentially as large scale Intel or AMD system integrators. At that point, price and little tweaks, plus support, become the only differentiators, and the Chinese can do it just as well, if not better. After all, for over a decade, even IBM's main PC server server design solution, integration and manufacturing facility for Asia Pacific was right in Shenzhen. The staff must have learned a lot during all those years, before many of them moved to the local big vendors, including Huawei...
Read more: *ttp://vr-zone.com/articles/huawei-moves-into-supercomputing-too-/16600.html#ixzz20CdhJGdw
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Huawei aims to be the new IBM?
Reported by Nebojsa Novakovic, March 2012 12:43 pm
China has now its share of high powered movers and shakers in the IT world. We all know how Lenovo masterfully played the strokes with its IBM PC division to become the global PC brand. How about the other big name there, Huawei?
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REVIEW
Huawei aims to be the new IBM?
If only reading the past stories about them in the western press, one would easily assume Huawei to be just a - very big one, though - plagiarizer of glorious western technology marvels in the networking and telecoms business, especially damaging to the once leading show in town, Cisco. While part of their business seemed a bit like that, the reality is that Huawei grew way beyond that level, and the new aspirations seem to be very serious, on the global level.
The staff in Huawei's Shenzhen outfit - not a small one mind you, with a square mile-sized campus of some 60,000 workers - shared with us some interesting stories. Firstly, the general Huawei strategy now, ordered from the very top, is not to be the new Cisco, but the new IBM. In this contest, it means controlling everything: from the whole hardware stack, including their own CPUs, own servers and of course own telecoms and networking stuff, improving the software stack, to much stronger solutions and services arm.
While the ARM handphone CPU Huawei has is just the beginning, despite its seemingly very high performance, they argue the real push will come at the high end, especially servers, since the company wants to become the dominant player in the field. It'd be interesting to see which CPUs they would use there, aside from the obligatory Intel lines, since China is abound now with its own high end CPU offerings.
Keep in mind that, while it may be associated with Chinese government and even PLA these days, Huawei had quite humble, enterprising beginnings. So, dismissing all this as a party-ordered big time plan would be a big mistake. As far as we're told, they are dead serious on this, and there's plenty of money and other resources to back the plan. More to come as we hear!
Read more: *ttp://vr-zone.com/articles/huawei-aims-to-be-the-new-ibm-/15368.html#ixzz20CfK5IrH
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