- Huawei may add HBM support to Kunpeng SoC
- Clues hint at Kunpeng 920 replacement launching in 2019
- New SoCs using HBM may target competitors in HPC and server markets
Huawei engineers have It is said New Linux patch released to enable driver support for the company’s High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) management armHigh-performance SoC based on Kunpeng.
Launched in January 2019, the Kunpeng 920 is the company’s first server CPU. It is a 7nm processor based on the Armv8.2 architecture and has up to 64 cores. It supports 8 DDR4 memory channels and has a thermal design power consumption (TDP) of up to 180W. While these specs were competitive when first launched, things have changed significantly since then.
The launch of new Fenpeng SoCs integrating HBM will be in line with industry trends as companies seek to increase memory bandwidth and performance to cope with increasingly demanding workloads. This may also indicate that Huawei is working hard to remain competitive in the HPC and server markets. Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC (霄龙).
No official announcement yet…
Philonix’s Michael Larabel points out that Huawei has yet to officially announce the new Fenpeng SoC (with or without HBM), and references to it are few and far between. However, kernel patches have previously shown work integrating HBM into the platform.
The latest patch specifically solves the power control issue of HBM devices on Kunpeng SoC and introduces the function of turning on or off HBM cache according to workload needs.
This patch series contains a detailed description of this feature. Huawei explains that HBM offers higher bandwidth but consumes more power. The proposed driver will allow users to manage HBM power consumption, optimizing energy usage for workloads that do not require high memory bandwidth.
These patches also introduce the HBM cache driver to support user space control of this functionality. By using HBM as cache, operating system You can take advantage of its bandwidth without having direct knowledge of the cache’s existence. When workload requirements are low, the cache can be turned off to save energy.
While we don’t have any specific details about future Kunpeng SoCs, integrating HBM may allow them to compete more effectively with other ARM-based server processors as well as Intel’s latest Xeon and AMD EPYC products.