Huawei Kunpeng 920 3211K vs Intel i9-9900K

Huawei is a company that makes their own chips for their smartphones, but now it also has their Kunpeng 920 3211K processor ready, a desktop processor that would put the Intel Core i9-9900K in trouble. It is manufactured in a 7nm process, incorporates 24 cores and is compatible with PCIe 4.0.



After the fame obtained by their mobile CPUs, the Kirin, the Chinese company has been thinking of competing in the desktop processors market. This news is starring what will be its next processor: the Kunpeng 920 3211K. It has technical specifications worthy of the high-end of Intel or AMD.

It is known around the world that Huawei is one of the technological giants that is banned in the United States, after being accused of espionage. This was a hard blow for the brand, but it rebuilt itself by developing its own applications store, and not only that, but it also went and invested a lot of money in the development of new processors.

 

Kunpeng 920 3211K vs i9-9900K

 
  Kunpeng 920 3211K
i9-9900K
Company Huawei Intel
Number of cores/threads
24/24 8/16
Max Frequency
2.6 GHz 5 GHz
Lithography 7 nm
14 nm
PCIe 4.0 compatibility
Yes Yes
Memory type supported
DDR4-3200 DDR4-2666
TDP Unknown, probably lower than 95W 95W
GPU Support
Only AMD Radeon RX 520
All consumer GPUs
Instruction Set Architecture ARM x86

Huawei's processor is called Kunpeng 920 3211K and is manufactured using a 7 nm process. It incorporates 24 cores with a maximum frequency of 2.6 GHz based on the ARM Neoverse N1 microarchitecture. It will support RAM memory interfaces up to DDR4-3200, such as PCIe 4.0 interface. There is no doubt that this chip in particular is designed for enterprise, this doesn't mean the door is closed for future Huawei gaming desktop CPUs.

 

Kunpeng 920 3211K Desktop configuration

Huawei desktop


To complete all the configuration of a Huawei desktop pc, the CPU would be accompanied by a Samsung SSD hard drive with a capacity of 512 GB and an AMD Radeon RX 520.

With this configuration, it could offer more multi-core performance than the Intel Core i9-9900K, which has 8 cores. However, we do not know the mono-core performance of the Huawei Kunpeng, but we assume that it will be far less than that offered by Intel's high-end chips, or any modern desktop processor.

That being said, the fact that the Kunpeng 920 can match Intel's i9 in this configuration is nothing crazy. Keep in mind that the Kunpeng 920 has 1.5 times more threads and triple the number of cores than the i9-9900K.

The i9-9900K has an 8-core, 16-thread configuration with a base frequency of 3.6 GHz, but with a turbo that can go up to 5.0 Ghz in one of its cores. Nevertheless its TDP is 95 W, a field in which Huawei processor can stand up to it thanks to its more efficient manufacturing process. Intel's chip base frequency is higher than the maximum of the Huawei chip.

In principle, Huawei is expected to be able to promote those computers for use by Chinese government agencies and certain Chinese technology companies. In this way, they will be computers that will be used only in China under the UOS (Unified Operating System). Everything indicates that we will not see these CPU being tested in benchmarks to be able to compare their performance with other counterpart chips.

We do not know the price of a PC with a Huawei Kunpeng CPU yet, nor the exact release dates. What seems clear is that this technology is born in China and that it will probably stay in China for a while. Unfortunately, we will not see this processor in the West.