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Chinese chips are on their way

by on31 January 2017


Huaxintong headed towards a server near you

It has only been a matter of time before Chinese chipmarkers start to catch up with the West and it looks like Huaxintong Semiconductor Technology will start heading to servers soon.

For those who came in late, Huaxintong Semiconductor Technology is working with Qualcomm to create a new server chip based on ARM tech.

Derek Aberle, president at Qualcomm said that the joint venture is currently going to end up in servers in the Chinese market.

What the joint venture company is developing is unclear, but the smart money suggests it could be a chip based around the Falkor CPU core used in Centriq 2400.

Huaxintong Semiconductor Technology could take Qualcomm's technology and customize the CPU for local customers. It could strip out or add I/O and throughput technologies to directly address customer needs.

But Qualcomm is not the only one working with the Chinese to create custom chips. Suzhou PowerCore is developing a CPU based on IBM's Power architecture. AMD is also doing something similar.

All these are aimed at the Chinese market and all are looking at creating chips for servers in data centres.

Chinese companies like Alibaba and Tencent want mega data centres for cloud and machine-learning services.

The reason for the drive for Chinese chips is because local companies do not want to buy from foreign vendors. Chinese servers are cheaper and potentially come with fewer national security risks.

Some of this is like proxy war where the superpowers battle it out on foreign ground. Intel rules the China server chip market, Qualcomm is trying to push its chips, based on ARM architecture. AMD and IBM would also like to stick their oar in too.

Ultimately, though, all of them will only win by co-operating with the Chinese who want to win.

China’s government is also encouraging the development of local chips because it wants to be self-reliant in the hardware market, with a majority of devices in the country running on homegrown components. In 2014, government said it would spend $150 billion over the next 10 years to grow its local semiconductor market.

Last modified on 31 January 2017
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