The chips designed by HiSilicon cover a wide range, including wifi networks, fixed networks, digital media and other fields, but the most concerned and highly concerned ones are processor chips, including mobile phone processor SoC, server chips and its AI chips.
On the technical level and threshold, the mobile phone with processor is obviously the least, and its market capacity is abundant, which can generate abundant economic benefits. This is vividly reflected in Huawei: the turnover of the company in fiscal year 2018 exceeded 100 billion USD, of which the revenue from mobile phones accounted for about 50%, and among all Huawei’s mobile phones, the share of its own Qinglong series processors also exceeded 50%. Huawei has completed the actual operation as a textbook in terms of high input-output rate of mobile phone processors. Naturally, this is not a temporary achievement, but the result of many years of perseverance and capital investment.
Huawei has accumulated many years in the research and development of Arm server chip products, and the curve is inevitable. Some chips launched in the early stage are obviously unsatisfactory, such as 32-core products based on Cortex-A57 architecture.
After many years of experience in product development and sales market, this time Huawei finally launched Kunpeng 920. This chip has 64 cores, and its cpu frequency is 2.8GHz. It is a server processor with excellent performance developed according to Armv8 instruction system products. It is called the strongest ARM server chip by using TSMC’s 7nm process, and its characteristics are higher than the industry standard by 25%. It is understood that most of the features of Kunpeng 920 are improved from the improved branch prediction algorithm, improved OP calculation and improved running memory subsystem architecture.
According to Xu Wenwei, executive director of Huawei’s shareholders’ meeting and chief executive of development strategy Marketing, in the SPECint standard test, Kunpeng’s 920 score exceeded 930 points, which was nearly 25% higher than the manufacturing industry standard, and the functional loss was reduced by 30%.
According to Kunpeng 920, Huawei has launched three series of product servers in ThaiShan, Shandong Province, including TaiShan22080, Thaishan5280/5290 and ThaiShanX6000, each of which is aimed at the sales market of balanced servers, storage servers and high-density servers. They are mainly used in the scenarios of Internet big data, distributed systems and the original application of Arm.
After the launch of Kunpeng 920, what Huawei needs to do is the construction and cultivation of ecological civilization. Because in front of the strong X86 green ecology, it is definitely not only possible to obtain customer order information by one or two processor chips and two or three server products. The penetration of manufacturing industry organizations and service platforms and the cooperation of basic construction, related hardware configuration and mobile phone software are all critical, and it is also difficult to do. However, Arm server manufacturers can rely on, that is, the sales market has this requirement, and they must get rid of monopoly. When monopoly reaches a certain level, there will be a turning point.
It can be said that both the mobile phone processor and the server chip belong to the traditional business process, and naturally, its technology and architecture are being updated iteratively with the development trend of market demand. Compared with them, the artificial intelligence technology (AI) processor is obviously a new thing. Although the definition of AI itself has been explicitly put forward many years ago, it is actually applied to the sales market and a relative processor is made, that is, in recent years.
At the AI level, Huawei is also unwilling. In October 2019, the company launched two self-developed AI chips: according to Da Vinci’s architecture, the first batch of 7nm Ascend 910 and its 12nm Ascend 310 were launched. Huawei claims that Shengteng 910 is a new AI product with high relative density of single chip measurement, and its calculation rate far exceeds that of TPUV3 and NVIDIAV100 discrete graphics developed by Google products. Its semi-precision (FP16) calculation capability is 256 tons flops, and its integer amount precision (Int8) INT8)512TOPS. It is suitable for 128 secure channel HD video decoding (H.264/265), with a large function loss of 350W.
The larger functional loss of Shengteng 310 chip is only 8W, which is the main push to measure the low-energy AI chip with perfect efficiency. Semi-precision (FP16) calculation capacity is 8TFLOPS, and integer amount precision (INT8) is 16 top s, which is suitable for 16 secure channel HD video decoding (H.264/265). It can be used in key low-energy products such as smart phones and smart products. This will mean that in the future, the NPU of Huawei Kirin processor may turn into self-research, and it is no longer necessary to purchase IP core integration from CAMBRIAN company. It is understood that these two AI chips and large-scale distributed system training system software will be launched in the second quarter of 2020.
Self-control is really difficult, but it must be done.
At the level of mobile phone processor, from 2009, HiSilicon launched the first K3 processor to the open market, until the launch of Kirin 980 in 2019. Huawei HiSilicon spent ten years, and only spent more than 300 million dollars on product research and development of Kirin 980 new project. The project was established in 2016, including cooperating with TSMC to carry out 7nm process science research, customizing unique basic modules and building high reliability IP and SoC productization certification. Finally, shape setting and mass production, with a capital investment of 36 months, more than 1,000 authoritative experts in semiconductor material design and processing technology, and more than 5,000 single-chip development boards certified by engineering projects.
In addition, Huawei HiSilicon is different from Samsung and iPhone in the research and development of mobile phone processor products. The most important thing in designing chips for the latter two is the use of processors, while HiSilicon pays more attention to the key technology-product research and development of baseband chips. As the baseband chip is the bridge between communication products and mobile phones, although there are many IP semiconductor materials in the sales market at this stage, if you want to buy the baseband IP of mobile phones, you have to buy the existing baseband chip from Qualcomm chip. This shows that the difficulty coefficient of product development is high, and the core content of the dispute between iPhone and Qualcomm chip is baseband chip. However, if we want to engage in product research and development and independent innovation, we must invest a lot of money, which is very basic chip science research.
In 2017, Huawei invested more in R&D than the total number of 400 A-share companies. In 17 years, Huawei’s R&D expenditure reached 89.7 billion RMB, greatly exceeding the iPhone and Qualcomm chips. In the past ten years, Huawei’s R&D expenditure exceeded RMB 394 billion, ranking first among global technology companies.
In 2013, Huawei Ren Zhengfei had an internal speech: the chip will be useless for the time being, but it still needs to be done again. Once a strategic system vulnerability occurs in an enterprise, it is not tens of billions of dollars, but hundreds of billions of dollars. Enterprises have accumulated so much wealth, this wealth will be due to that one point, so that others get stuck and eventually die. It is the flag of the development strategy of the enterprise, and can’t be slackened.
Although Huawei has strong confidence in independent R&D, large capital investment, and it ranks among the top levels in China, it is still difficult to achieve self-control in many aspects, especially in mobile phone processors and server chips.
Take Kirin 970, which has exploded in the sales market for 17 years, as an example. Its unfeeling 8-core CPU and 12-core GPU still can’t escape IP giants like Arm. Under the influence of trade disputes among countries and its ideological and political power, the reliance on Arm makes the risk of industrial chain inevitable.
The Arm server chip is highly dependent on Arm, and it is also a double-edged knife.
Because the mobile phone processor and server belong to the traditional manufacturing industry, the green ecology has already emerged and is very strong. In these aspects, the Arm server chip is more typical: even if X86 accounts for more than 90% of the market share, it is still Arm that we cannot control independently, which shows how crucial the advantages of green ecology are. In these respects, the latecomers have congenital defects, which are hard to avoid.
In order to create its own green ecology, the key expectation is the commodity and application of newborns, and typicality means artificial intelligence technology, which is the top priority of Huawei’s actions. Its launch of the Ascent 910 and Ascent 310 is a brand-new upgrade architecture-Michael Jackson, which is independently researched and developed. For this matter, Xu Zhijun, the boss of Huawei’s rotation system at that time, indicated that it was often not based on the previous chip architecture, but just a brand-new upgraded architecture, because at this stage, there was no architecture in the sales market that could cover the whole scene. Huawei’s rising series products can complete full coverage. Huawei must cover the architecture from the cloud, to the edge, to the Internet of Things technology, which must be completely upgraded, and the architecture of imagination.
To sum up, the logic of Huawei’s processor product research and development is: taking the mobile phone processor with low threshold as a breakthrough, continuously accumulating experience in product research and development and sales market, gradually connecting to the server field, and prospering its application (AI at this stage), and continuously getting involved in higher-grade chips.
At the level of self-control, in the traditional manufacturing industry, such as mobile phones and servers, under the current situation of strong green ecology, a large number of people can gain a firm foothold from the perspective of sales market, and then Xu Tuzhi will strive to gradually increase the proportion of self-control. In the main purpose of prosperity, we try to build our own framework and green ecology as soon as possible, and win the initiative in the early stage of industrial development planning, so as to solve the external dependence at the level of competitive advantage.
