Benchmark results for Huawei's HiSilicon Taishan V120 server CPU unexpectedly appeared online, revealing performance surprisingly on par with AMD's Zen 3 cores from four years ago.
The results, found on Geekbench here and here, suggest that Huawei's chip technology may not be too far behind leading CPU makers AMD and Intel.
As Tom Hardware The Taishan V120 core, from Huawei's HiSilicon subsidiary, was reportedly first seen in Huawei's Kirin 9000s smartphone chip. The new Geekbench 6 results, which were uploaded a few days ago, indicate that the Taishan V120 core is likely manufactured on the second-generation 7nm node, as is the case with the Kirin 9000 chips.
Single Core Benchmarking
However, the exact CPU model tested remains a mystery, with the only clue being “Huawei Cloud OpenStack Nova” on the testing pages. This suggests it could be a Kunpeng server CPU, possibly the Kunpeng 930, given its high single-core performance.
The Kunpeng 930 has been relatively elusive since its announcement in 2019. A 2021 report speculated a launch that year on TSMC's 5nm, followed by the Kunpeng 950 in 2023 on TSMC's 3nm node. However, these plans were likely abandoned due to Huawei's ban on manufacturing at TSMC.
The tests were run on a single core, implying that the chip may have been tested in a virtual machine or a similar setup. Therefore, the multi-core score may not accurately reflect the overall performance of the chip.
In the single-core scoring benchmark, the Taishan V120 CPU scored 1,527, slightly behind AMD's Epyc 7413 with 1,538 and Intel's Xeon E-2136 with 1,553. It was significantly outperformed by the Epyc 9554, which scored 1957, and the Xeon w9-3495X, which led the pack with a score of 2087.
As Tom Hardware notes that without data on performance, power consumption, and multi-threaded efficiency, it is difficult to gauge the competitiveness of Taishan V120 cores. Regardless of the speed, the high power consumption could deter potential users due to the cost of electricity.
