Intel Halts Chip Supply to Leading Chinese Server-Maker

[antonius123]

Intel Halts Chip Supply to Leading Chinese Server-Maker


What’s new: U.S. chip giant Intel confirmed to Caixin that it has stopped supplying its products to Inspur, China’s largest maker of computer servers.

An Intel representative described the move as temporary and estimated the suspension would last for about two weeks. Intel took the step to allow the company time to make adjustments to comply with relevant U.S. laws, the person said.

Why is this happening: On June 25, Inspur was named by the U.S. Defense Department as one of 20 Chinese firms that were owned or controlled by the Chinese military. Others on the list included telecom equipment maker Huawei, and surveillance equipment maker Hikvision.

Potential impacts for companies included on the list were not immediately clear at its time of publication.

But the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has aggressively blacklisted companies, including Huawei and Hikvision, to prevent them from getting American-made technology that many of their products rely on. Blacklisted companies cannot buy from their U.S. suppliers unless those suppliers get special licenses from Washington.

Quick Takes are condensed versions of China-related stories for fast news you can use. To read the full Caixin article in Chinese, click here.

https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-0...o-leading-chinese-server-maker-101574409.html

 

[JustAnotherPerson]

So this is it, the beginning of the end of X86.
long live OpenPower, ARM and RISC-V
or is it?
http://en.zhaoxin.com/

 

[antonius123]

Huawei has launched ARM based CPU for server Jan 2019, but i dont know how much the gap with the latest server chip from Intel or AMD.

Huawei Kunpeng 920 64-Core Arm Server CPU with CCIX and PCIe Gen4 Launched
ByPatrick Kennedy

January 7, 2019


Huawei Kunpeng 920 Launch Cover

Today Huawei announced a new 64-Core Arm Server CPU. The Huawei Kunpeng 920 is being billed as the fastest Arm CPU to date. One thing is for sure, there is going to be interest in this CPU not just for the 64 custom Arm cores, but also the I/O that the chip has onboard. We thought we would take a moment to show what Huawei is building, and why it is important.

Huawei Kunpeng 920 64-Core Arm Server CPU
Huawei has a design team that has been producing CPUs for years. We are going to get into the business reason for this in a bit, but what the company is doing seems far from gluing Arm cores together. Instead, the company is producing an integrated chip with high-speed I/O. Further, it is the first dual socket Arm 7nm server chip that has been publicly announced. It is also the first chip with DDR4-2933 support, a spec we expect companies like Intel and AMD to match with their 2019 parts.

Huawei Kunpeng 920 Performance
Beyond the CPU cores and 8 channel DDR4-2933 memory controller, the company is also introducing PCIe Gen4 and CCIX support. We know that AMD EPYC Rome will support PCIe Gen4 this year (likely with CCIX), and Intel Cascade Lake will not. Like we saw Cavium do with the original ThunderX, Huawei is also integrating networking with a 100GbE RoCE NIC in the Kunpeng 920.

Huawei believes the high core count and solid clock speeds of 2.6GHz will give it enough performance to be ahead of many of the competitive offerings out there. We will take a second to note that with both AMD and Intel pushing close to 4GHz, the 2.6GHz Arm cores are likely not going to match single thread performance. All of the numbers we have seen from Huawei are using multiple threads and the 25% faster claim is using the depreciated SPEC CPU2006 integer test, not the current generation SPEC CPU2017 that we used in our Cavium/ Marvell ThunderX2 launch piece.

Huawei Kunpeng 920 2.6GHz Performance
Overall, this is an interesting Arm server offering, and we expect more high core count Arm CPUs to come out in the coming year(s). AMD will have a 64 core part this year and Intel will have a 48 core, higher clock speed part with Cascade Lake-AP.

Business Side of the Kunpeng 920
Beyond the chip itself, there are a number of commercial questions raised by the Huawei Kunpeng 920. First is, where will they get used? A new Huawei TaiShan server line will utilize the chips. There are three servers that will include the chips. One is the Huawei TaiShan 2280 which is a traditional 2U dual socket form factor. The TaiShan 5280/ 5290 is a storage server platform in 4U 40-bay and 72-bay configurations. Finally, the Huawei TaiShan X6000 is a 2U 4-node server.

Huawei TaiShan Servers
Although the spec was not listed in what we saw, the 32x DDR4-2933 maximum spec seems to indicate that the Huawei Kunpeng 920 is a two DIMM per channel design.

Beyond the traditional server form factors, the company is announcing their intent to offer the Huawei Cloud ARM service which will have elastic compute and bare metal provisioning for the Kunpeng 920 based servers. Companies can use this for things like Arm phone services. Huawei says that the cloud service will be up to 3x the performance of the AWS EC2 A1 Graviton based instances. We putting the AWS Graviton and its Arm CPU performance in context and found that AWS’s offering was not up to par with modern single socket performance.

Huawei Cloud Arm Service
A fascinating aspect to the presentation was the ecosystem slide, specifically the hardware swim lane.

Huawei Arm Ecosystem
One can see that Intel is in three of the five Huawei Arm hardware partner boxes. When we discussed how Intel is focused beyond just supplying CPUs to achieve higher TAM, for example in Intel One API to Rule Them All Is Much Needed, this is a great example. Even if the sever is using an Arm CPU, Intel has a number of other vectors to play in.

Final Words
In 2019, we are going to hear a lot more about the Arm Neoverse. Huawei is not aiming to be a merchant of silicon for others to use such as with the ThunderX2 and Ampere eMAG. Instead, Huawei is using the chips, like AWS is, to offer its own products and services. That is important for two reasons. First, it is a great bargaining tool for negotiations with Intel. Second, it is also setting up a dichotomy in the Arm space where there will be two types of Arm CPUs people use. There will be vendor specific CPUs and on the other end of the spectrum merchant CPUs. This is much like in the smartphone space where there are custom Apple SoC’s and merchant Qualcomm SoCs. Arm vendors are working on building a base infrastructure for compatibility purposes.

We look forward to companies pushing the CPU envelope with designs like the Huawei Kunpeng 920. While 2019 has just started, it is going to be one of the most interesting years in server CPUs in over a decade.

https://www.servethehome.com/huawei-kunpeng-920-64-core-arm-server-cpu/

 

[Viet]

Huawei has launched ARM based CPU for server Jan 2019, but i dont know how much the gap with the latest server chip from Intel or AMD.

Huawei Kunpeng 920 64-Core Arm Server CPU with CCIX and PCIe Gen4 Launched
ByPatrick Kennedy

January 7, 2019


Huawei Kunpeng 920 Launch Cover

Today Huawei announced a new 64-Core Arm Server CPU. The Huawei Kunpeng 920 is being billed as the fastest Arm CPU to date. One thing is for sure, there is going to be interest in this CPU not just for the 64 custom Arm cores, but also the I/O that the chip has onboard. We thought we would take a moment to show what Huawei is building, and why it is important.

Huawei Kunpeng 920 64-Core Arm Server CPU
Huawei has a design team that has been producing CPUs for years. We are going to get into the business reason for this in a bit, but what the company is doing seems far from gluing Arm cores together. Instead, the company is producing an integrated chip with high-speed I/O. Further, it is the first dual socket Arm 7nm server chip that has been publicly announced. It is also the first chip with DDR4-2933 support, a spec we expect companies like Intel and AMD to match with their 2019 parts.

Huawei Kunpeng 920 Performance
Beyond the CPU cores and 8 channel DDR4-2933 memory controller, the company is also introducing PCIe Gen4 and CCIX support. We know that AMD EPYC Rome will support PCIe Gen4 this year (likely with CCIX), and Intel Cascade Lake will not. Like we saw Cavium do with the original ThunderX, Huawei is also integrating networking with a 100GbE RoCE NIC in the Kunpeng 920.

Huawei believes the high core count and solid clock speeds of 2.6GHz will give it enough performance to be ahead of many of the competitive offerings out there. We will take a second to note that with both AMD and Intel pushing close to 4GHz, the 2.6GHz Arm cores are likely not going to match single thread performance. All of the numbers we have seen from Huawei are using multiple threads and the 25% faster claim is using the depreciated SPEC CPU2006 integer test, not the current generation SPEC CPU2017 that we used in our Cavium/ Marvell ThunderX2 launch piece.

Huawei Kunpeng 920 2.6GHz Performance
Overall, this is an interesting Arm server offering, and we expect more high core count Arm CPUs to come out in the coming year(s). AMD will have a 64 core part this year and Intel will have a 48 core, higher clock speed part with Cascade Lake-AP.

Business Side of the Kunpeng 920
Beyond the chip itself, there are a number of commercial questions raised by the Huawei Kunpeng 920. First is, where will they get used? A new Huawei TaiShan server line will utilize the chips. There are three servers that will include the chips. One is the Huawei TaiShan 2280 which is a traditional 2U dual socket form factor. The TaiShan 5280/ 5290 is a storage server platform in 4U 40-bay and 72-bay configurations. Finally, the Huawei TaiShan X6000 is a 2U 4-node server.

Huawei TaiShan Servers
Although the spec was not listed in what we saw, the 32x DDR4-2933 maximum spec seems to indicate that the Huawei Kunpeng 920 is a two DIMM per channel design.

Beyond the traditional server form factors, the company is announcing their intent to offer the Huawei Cloud ARM service which will have elastic compute and bare metal provisioning for the Kunpeng 920 based servers. Companies can use this for things like Arm phone services. Huawei says that the cloud service will be up to 3x the performance of the AWS EC2 A1 Graviton based instances. We putting the AWS Graviton and its Arm CPU performance in context and found that AWS’s offering was not up to par with modern single socket performance.

Huawei Cloud Arm Service
A fascinating aspect to the presentation was the ecosystem slide, specifically the hardware swim lane.

Huawei Arm Ecosystem
One can see that Intel is in three of the five Huawei Arm hardware partner boxes. When we discussed how Intel is focused beyond just supplying CPUs to achieve higher TAM, for example in Intel One API to Rule Them All Is Much Needed, this is a great example. Even if the sever is using an Arm CPU, Intel has a number of other vectors to play in.

Final Words
In 2019, we are going to hear a lot more about the Arm Neoverse. Huawei is not aiming to be a merchant of silicon for others to use such as with the ThunderX2 and Ampere eMAG. Instead, Huawei is using the chips, like AWS is, to offer its own products and services. That is important for two reasons. First, it is a great bargaining tool for negotiations with Intel. Second, it is also setting up a dichotomy in the Arm space where there will be two types of Arm CPUs people use. There will be vendor specific CPUs and on the other end of the spectrum merchant CPUs. This is much like in the smartphone space where there are custom Apple SoC’s and merchant Qualcomm SoCs. Arm vendors are working on building a base infrastructure for compatibility purposes.

We look forward to companies pushing the CPU envelope with designs like the Huawei Kunpeng 920. While 2019 has just started, it is going to be one of the most interesting years in server CPUs in over a decade.

https://www.servethehome.com/huawei-kunpeng-920-64-core-arm-server-cpu/

Chinese tech companies rely on western tech. You need to cooperate with East and West. Nobody can survive alone. With aggressive politics you alienate friends and foes. Without western input Chinese tech companies will hit a dead end, have no future.

 

[Yaseen1]

china will halt rare metals supply in response

 

[striver44]

china will halt rare metals supply in response

China can’t control the market in rare earth elements because they aren’t all that rare

 

[Yaseen1]

until china is able to develop these chips on their own they can control this market and can increase costs of manufacturing of these chips by halting supply in market

China can’t control the market in rare earth elements because they aren’t all that rare

 

[JustAnotherPerson]

Chinese tech companies rely on western tech. You need to cooperate with East and West. Nobody can survive alone. With aggressive politics you alienate friends and foes. Without western input Chinese tech companies will hit a dead end, have no future.

Oh no no no, there will be collaborations with almost all Western countries, by example Huawei planing a 1 billion chip research center and foundry in the UK. That collaboration could include US companies who manage to avoid export controls by moving to other countries, the problem will be with things made in US that are not either free or Open Source. So they will be job loses in the tech sector. No company will invest billions to buy tech that could not be available when is needed.

China can’t control the market in rare earth elements because they aren’t all that rare

They are no rare but pretty difficult to process and the pollution from rare earth processing is pretty devastating, that is why many countries dont want to deal with that, that of processing rare earth in clean manner is pretty expensive.

 

[Daniel808]

China can’t control the market in rare earth elements because they aren’t all that rare

Although they are called rare, rare earth elements are not extremely rare on Earth. They were called this because they are spread very evenly over the Earth, so it is hard to find a lot in one place



https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element

china will halt rare metals supply in response

They don't need to fully halt, even when they playing with monthly supplies thats enough.

That would have devastating effect to companies that depends on rare-earth because the price will going much higher

 

[striver44]

Although they are called rare, rare earth elements are not extremely rare on Earth. They were called this because they are spread very evenly over the Earth, so it is hard to find a lot in one place



https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element



They don't need to fully halt, even when they playing with monthly supplies thats enough.

That would have devastating effect to companies that depends on rare-earth because the price will going much higher

All this looks like it gives China immense power over the market, but the truth is the world is benefiting at China’s expense. Proof of this came in 2010 when China did actually start limiting rare earth exports because of a dispute with Japan. This threat to the supply chain caused prices to rise, and so investment flowed into new and old rare earth mining projects. Meanwhile, consumers of rare earths like Hitachi and Mitsubishi altered their products to use less of each substance.

In other words, when China tried to take advantage of its monopoly and limit supply, the rest of the world picked up the slack. As a think tank report on the fallout from the 2010 incident put it: “Even with such apparently favorable circumstances, market power and political leverage proved fleeting and difficult [for China] to exploit.” Markets responded and “the problem rapidly faded.” (Money even flowed back into Mountain Pass for a while, although the company in charge, Molycorp, collapsed in 2015 when rare earth prices fell back to 2010 levels.)

 

[antonius123]

All this looks like it gives China immense power over the market, but the truth is the world is benefiting at China’s expense. Proof of this came in 2010 when China did actually start limiting rare earth exports because of a dispute with Japan. This threat to the supply chain caused prices to rise, and so investment flowed into new and old rare earth mining projects. Meanwhile, consumers of rare earths like Hitachi and Mitsubishi altered their products to use less of each substance.

In other words, when China tried to take advantage of its monopoly and limit supply, the rest of the world picked up the slack. As a think tank report on the fallout from the 2010 incident put it: “Even with such apparently favorable circumstances, market power and political leverage proved fleeting and difficult [for China] to exploit.” Markets responded and “the problem rapidly faded.” (Money even flowed back into Mountain Pass for a while, although the company in charge, Molycorp, collapsed in 2015 when rare earth prices fell back to 2010 levels.)

Banning someone from buying their product of course will expense the banner, it not only applied on China rare earth material vendors, but also US chip vendor when US ban Huawei/ZTE.

But banning US from REM can buy China time to catch or even leapfrog US technology, because it will disrupt US tech supply chain sometimes then slowing down their development progress. Hopefully by the time US can be independent from China's REM vendor, China will be also independent from US tech. Of course China must hurry, because it will be a race between arrivals of China independence vs US independence, whoever come first will be the winner.

Barrier of REM is not only about the mining/raw material source, but the processing technology that China has mastered so far.

 

[Daniel808]

Banning someone from buying their product of course will expense the banner, it not only applied on China rare earth material vendors, but also US chip vendor when US ban Huawei/ZTE.

But banning US from REM can buy China time to catch or even leapfrog US technology. Hopefully by the time US can be independent from China's REM vendor, China will be also independent from US tech.

Barrier of REM is not only about the mining/raw material source, but the processing technology that China has mastered so far.

Well said

 

[striver44]

Banning someone from buying their product of course will expense the banner, it not only applied on China rare earth material vendors, but also US chip vendor when US ban Huawei/ZTE.

But banning US from REM can buy China time to catch or even leapfrog US technology. Hopefully by the time US can be independent from China's REM vendor, China will be also independent from US tech.

Barrier of REM is not only about the mining/raw material source, but the processing technology that China has mastered so far.

what are you talking about LMAO
10 Top Countries for Rare Earth Metal Production

 

[antonius123]

what are you talking about LMAO
10 Top Countries for Rare Earth Metal Production

You dont understand?

OK, let me simplify, and explain you step by step so that you could understand.

As it is written in your own source:
As mentioned, China has dominated rare earths production for a number of years. In 2019, its domestic output of 132,000 MT was up from 120,000 MT the previous year.
https://investingnews.com/daily/res...rth-investing/rare-earth-producing-countries/

Do you agree that China's banning REM will certainly disrupt REM supply chain?

 

[striver44]

You dont understand?

OK, let me simplify, and explain you step by step so that you could understand.

As it is written in your own source:
As mentioned, China has dominated rare earths production for a number of years. In 2019, its domestic output of 132,000 MT was up from 120,000 MT the previous year.
https://investingnews.com/daily/res...rth-investing/rare-earth-producing-countries/

Do you agree that China's banning REM will certainly disrupt REM supply chain?

you don't read my previous post aren't you, doesn't matter, here...

in other words, when China tried to take advantage of its monopoly and limit supply, the rest of the world picked up the slack. As a think tank report on the fallout from the 2010 incident put it: “Even with such apparently favorable circumstances, market power and political leverage proved fleeting and difficult [for China] to exploit.” Markets responded and “the problem rapidly faded.” (Money even flowed back into Mountain Pass for a while, although the company in charge, Molycorp, collapsed in 2015 when rare earth prices fell back to 2010 levels.)

trying to ban the US from the material just wouldn't work, the market quickly responded by moving the production elsewhere.