Domestic products should be self-reliant! China Telecom favors domestic CPU servers

A few days ago, China Telecom started the 2020 server centralized procurement qualification pre-qualification, and the estimated centralized procurement scale is 56,314 units. The announcement shows that this centralized procurement is divided into 8 bid packages, totaling 56,314 units. Among them, the I series refers to servers whose CPU type uses the second-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor Gold series or Silver series chips; the A series refers to the CPU type that uses the second-generation AMDEPYC7002 series processor.

In addition, it is worth noting that this centralized procurement separately lists H-series nationally produced servers containing Huawei Kunpeng 920 chips or Haiguang HYGONDhyana series processors. This is the first time that nationally produced servers have been separately included in the bidding catalog.

In terms of quantity, the number of H-series server collections is 11,185, accounting for nearly 20%. It is understood that the Kunpeng 920 processor is a high-performance data center processor released by Huawei in January 2019. It is independently developed and designed by Huawei based on the ARM architecture and is designed to meet the needs of diverse computing and green computing in data centers. Haiguang HYGONDhyana processor was developed by a joint venture established by AMD and Tianjin Haiguang (Tianjin Haiguang holds 51% of the equity). It is a customized processor specifically for the domestic server market. Production started in 2018.

It can be seen that the industrial chain of H-series domestic servers has just been formed. In the short term, it will not be able to compete with the Intel It has been applied and tested in a variety of scenarios.

At present, my country's independent and controllable industrial chain can be roughly divided into three categories: basic software (operating system, database, middleware), basic hardware (CPU, server, storage, network equipment), and application software (enterprise services). The servers purchased by China Telecom this time belong to one of these categories. Being able to be applied in the live network is the first step to realize self-controllability.

In this centralized procurement, the H series involves two server chips, namely the Huawei Kunpeng 920 chip and the Haiguang HYGOND hyanax86 chip. It should be pointed out that to be able to enter China Telecom's centralized procurement catalog, it must have withstood the operator's rigorous all-round testing and meet the needs of various application scenarios.

It is understood that Huawei Kunpeng is based on a series of chips. The Huawei Kunpeng ecosystem includes independently controllable PCs, servers, storage, operating systems, middleware, virtualization, databases, cloud services, etc. At the same time, Haiguang's domestic x86 processor has completed technology iteration. Currently, Haiguang has completed technology absorption and is starting technology iteration. It is expected that 14nm Haiguang 2 will start mass production at TSMC and Samsung in the second half of this year, and 7nm will be trialled by the end of 20.

This time, China Telecom included domestic servers separately in the bidding catalog, and the focus is also to cultivate domestic independent and controllable industrial chains. On the one hand, China Telecom has a very rich server application scenario, which can be seen from the content of centralized procurement, including computing type, big data type, distributed storage type, NFV type, GPU type, etc., which can provide services for the domestic server industry chain. Quite a lot of "experience places".

On the other hand, in recent years, at the technological level, companies such as ZTE and Huawei have been frequently suppressed by Western countries, and self-control has become an important task. China Telecom is a central enterprise, and the title "central enterprise" means responsibility, because central enterprises bear political responsibilities, economic responsibilities, social responsibilities and corporate development responsibilities. Therefore, it is necessary for central enterprises to set an example to cultivate domestic independent and controllable industrial chains.

Of course, we can also see that China Telecom is currently cultivating a domestic independent and controllable industrial chain in the most cautious way. It is undisputed that Intel server chips based on x86 architecture are still the mainstream choice for current server machines, and the cultivation of the industry chain is not achieved overnight, but is a step-by-step process. On the premise of ensuring the stable operation of the current system, actively introducing fresh domestic blood is the most reasonable choice.