At this point in time, it’s not wrong to say that Huawei is clearly feeling the pinch of the US’ executive order and sanctions, plus the subsequent loss of silicon partners and suppliers. That doesn’t mean the Chinese brand hasn’t been idle though, and recently, news has emerged that the company is currently working on new desktop CPU.
The CPU is reportedly a part of Huawei’s Kunpeng lineup and is being developed using the brand’s massive stockpiled of chips it had been amassing since sanctions on it were imposed. On paper, the CPU is officially called the Kunpeng 920 3211K, there are two takeaways to this story. First, the CPU is said to be a 24-core monster, but more to the point, reports are saying that it outperforms Intel’s 9th generation Core i9-9900K CPU.
To be both fair and specific, that feat seems to only be achievable in terms of multi-core performance, and not single-core, indicating that the Huawei there are some hurdles left for the company to get across in that aspect. Interestingly, the report also said that Huawei’s 24-core CPU was able to outperform the Core i9-9900K’s multi-core performance using a 200W PSU as well.
As for the desktop system Huawei has built for it, we’re certainly not going to find it outside of China anytime soon; known internally as Pangu, is said to support up to 64GB DDR4 RAM, and features an array of PCIe 3.0 slots, M.2 SSD slots, and six SATA 3.0 slots.
By a stroke of luck, though, someone had managed to get their hands on a base model of the Pangu. However, this desktop variant came with an 8-cores Kunpeng 920 CPU, 16GB RAM, a 256GB SSD, and a non-generic, Chinese brand GPU. Even the OS running on the system is different; instead of Windows 10, the system runs on Unified Operating System (UOS), a Linux-based OS developed by Tongxin Software as a potential replacement in China.
