- Huawei describes the Kunpeng road map with 256 cores CPU scale by 2028
- The reference sampling processor is known as Kunpeng 960 that delivers 4.8 million TPM
- SUPERPOD Built in Kunpeng 950 aims
Huawei has outlined plans to expand his family of Kunpeng processors with models that scale up to 256 cores by 2028.
“In the first quarter of 2026, we will present the Kunpeng 950 processor in two models: one with 96 nuclei and 192 wires, and another with 192 nuclei and 384 threads,” said the rotating president of Huawei, Eric Xu, in his Keynote speech in his recent Connect 2025 event in Shanghai.
These processors will admit the Taishan 950 superpod, which can include up to 16 nodes and 48 TB of memory.
Kunpeng 960
Built in the Kunpeng 950, the superpod will be “the first computer superpod for the general use of the world,” Xu added.
It is being presented as a replacement option for inherited mainframes and medium -range computers that are still used in the financial sector.
With GaussDB, the Huawei distributed database system, the superpod can provide an increase in performance of 2.9x reported without requiring modifications to existing configurations.
Xu suggested that this could make it a candidate to replace systems such as Oracle exadatos.
Looking later, Xu confirmed that Huawei is planning a 256 core processor.
“In the first quarter of 2028, we planned to introduce two models, including a high density design with at least 256 cores and 512 wires,” he said.
This chip is intended for virtualization, containers, big data and warehouse workloads.
A second model will focus on a higher nucleus yield, improving in more than 50% for cases of use of AI and the database.
The MOGDB performance points, the open -based open source database based on OpenGauss, suggest that Kunpeng can effectively climb in large implementations.
Using optimized memory tables, a Kunpeng configuration of 256 cores achieved 4.8 million transactions per minute with 768 connections, illustrating how workloads improve as the concurrence increases.
The interesting thing is that although Xu did not appoint the processor during his key note, at the reference points it is known as the Kunpeng 960. That would make sense, since Huawei already uses the designation 960 in its lines of Atlas and Ascend products.
Huawei said he will continue to refine Microarchitecture technology and Kunpeng packaging.
If delivered as planned, the 256 core processor would mark one of the largest general CPU available.
While the official objective of 2028 seems reasonable, I wonder if the existence of these reference points means that Huawei is more anticipated than they have made us believe and the chip could come before.
We have communicated with Huawei for more information about the Kunpeng 960, but we are not containing our breathing.
