Huawei's 24-Core 7nm Kunpeng CPU Allegedly Beats Core i9-9900K In Multi-Core Performance

Chinese news outlet IThome received word that Huawei is on the brink if launching the brand's new desktop PC (internally known as Pangu) for the domestic market. The system utilizes a variant of the company's Kunpeng 920, which is also known as the Hi1620. The report claims that the Kunpeng 920 3211K's multi-core performance is slightly better than the Intel Core i9-9900K Coffee Lake processor.

The Kunpeng 920, which is based on Arm's Neoverse N1 (codename Ares) microarchitecture, boasts core configurations that span from 24 up to 64 cores, running between 2.4 GHz and 3 GHz. TSMC used to produce Kunpeng 920 for Huawei on its 7nm process node before cutting off all ties with Chinese tech giant due to new U.S. regulations.

The Kunpeng 920 3211K in particular has 24 cores that max out at 2.6 GHz. Huawei pairs the processor with 8GB of SO-DIMM memory, a 512GB Samsung SSD and AMD’s Radeon 520 mobile graphics card.

Huawei tailors the Pangu to government and enterprise markets, meaning the system is equipped with China's homemade Unified Operating System (UOS). User expansion and customization on the Pangu is close to zero. The Kunpeng 920 3211K is soldered to the motherboard and doesn't support other graphics cards. The UOS is cemented into the PC so you can't install Windows on it either. We suspect you may be able to upgrade the memory or SSD, but that's about it.

The purported images of the Pangu show three USB Type-A ports, one USB Type-C port and a single 3.5mm headphone jack in the front of the case. There is also room for an optical drive. The rear of the case holds four USB Type-A ports, one Ethernet port, three 3.5mm audio jacks and a D-Sub port. IThome's report states that the Pangu comes with a 23.8-inch monitor with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and 70% NTSC color gamut.

Pricing and the exact release date for the Pangu is unknown. The IThome reader only insinuated that the Pangu will launch soon.