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Latest Xeons land in new Huawei server despite looming US ban

Although Huawei’s details are rather thin on this one

Despite looming US government bans preventing access to American technology, Huawei has announced a new server based on the third-generation Intel Xeon scalable processors launched just this week.

The Chinese company was a little cagey in its reveal of the new FusionServer Pro 2488H V6, as it has not mentioned which of the new Xeons it’s employed. It doesn’t even mention core count or clockspeed to give us a clue.

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Nor has it offered a specs sheet or any of the usual detail to accompany a new server launch.

We’ve asked Huawei for further detail and will update this story if it is forthcoming, but don’t expect much as we’ve been told our query will need to go to headquarters and the last time that happened no answer was provided.

What we can say is that the new server can pack four Xeons, hold up to 18TB of storage, is also ready to put Intel’s Optane persistent memory to work and includes WiFi and USB-C management port.

We also know that the new ban on Huawei accessing US tech comes into effect in September 2020 and that Intel has applied for licences that would exempt it from the US bans.

It seems sensible for Uncle Sam to let Chipzilla get one of those passes, because China has a home-grown chip designer named Zhaoxin Semiconductor that is a joint venture between x86-licencee Via Technologies and has cranked out some credible desktop silicon. Zhaoxin also plans 7nm kit next year. Intel’s ecosystem-building efforts among software vendors to make sure their wares run well on Xeons are almost as important as the tech in a Xeon itself, which means that even if Zhaoxin takes huge hardware strides it would still have a lot of work to do to make Huawei servers comparably competitive to Xeon-packing rivals. ®

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