Huawei HiSilicon's chip design capabilities have always been at a high level, but many people, especially ordinary readers, do not know how high HiSilicon's chips have reached in terms of performance. However, the single-core performance of the Taishan V120 server processor developed by HiSilicon recently**, this chip that has been shipped last year, looks like it is still performing well, and the AMD Zen 3 processor launched in 2020 has the same single-core performance, which is not bad for domestic companies.
According to some unconfirmed accounts, the Tarzan V120 core first appeared in Huawei's Kirin 9000S smartphone chip, which uses four cores as well as two efficiency-focused Arm Cortex A510 cores. Since the Kirin 9000S chip is considered by many to be produced by SMIC's second-generation 7nm technology, the Taishan V120 core tested in Geekbench 6 is the same as the Kirin 9000S in terms of process.
Judging from the overseas benchmark results, this chip does not really say what the actual CPU model is, and the only identity hint is "Huawei Cloud OpenStack Nova". This means that it is a Kunpeng server CPU, and given the high single-core performance shown in the results, overseas believes that this chip is a Kunpeng 930. Because the Kunpeng 920 has shown in some tests that the performance is far behind AMD's first-generation EPYC Naples processors in 2017.
Speaking of the Kunpeng 930, here are some other interesting things to share. Originally, according to Huawei's plan, the Kunpeng 930 will be produced by TSMC's 5nm, and then the Kunpeng 950 will be produced by TSMC's 3nm, but because Huawei has been sanctioned, all this is in vain, speaking of tests, this time the test for Taishan v120 is limited to a single-core test, but you must know that the processor of the Kunpeng server can have multiple cores (the previous generation of Kunpeng 920 is 64 cores), so this result does not actually represent the final multi-core level, just for a reference.
According to the performance rankings tested, the single-core performance of the Tarzan V120 is roughly on par with AMD's Zen 3-based EPYC Milan processor. It is also roughly equivalent to Intel's Xeon E-2136, a processor based on the Coffee Lake architecture of Xeon, which was born in 2018. Considering that Huawei's HiSilicon CPU runs at 29 GHz, so this performance test is not bad, you must know that AMD's processor frequency reaches 36 GHz, while Intel's E-2136 has a maximum frequency of 45 ghz。
Of course, the single-core performance of Huawei HiSilicon's processor cannot be compared with the latest AMD and Intel server processors, with a performance gap of more than 25%, and the key is that its energy consumption is not yet known. For server processors, in addition to performance, power consumption and efficiency are the key, even in the domestic environment, if the power consumption of Huawei's server processors is too high due to process problems, even if the performance is not bad, but I am afraid that there will be a question mark in the competitiveness part!