- AMD’s Zen 1 technology gave Hygon an advantage, but catching up is difficult
- The fusion of Sugon and Hygon points to Intel and AMD, but the performance test is still difficult to achieve
- With the SMT4 potential, Hygon Eyes’s elite territory in the fastest CPU race
An important consolidation is being carried out in the China semiconductor industry after two key actors, Hygon and Sugon announced their merger.
The agreement represents an effort to strengthen China’s capabilities in high performance computing, which potentially raises a serious challenge for chipas giants, AMD and US NVIDIA. UU.
While the merger seems formidable on paper, its global impact remains uncertain due to technical, political and market limitations.
An integrated force in the supercomputing
This implies the use of SMT4 (multiple simultaneous readings with four threads per nucleus), a technology only IBM has been implemented on a scale, starting with its Power7 architecture in 2010.
Hygon Chips Development Roots date back to a 2016 license agreement with AMD, which gave access to the design of CPU Zen 1 and the X86-64 architecture.
Although the resulting chips, marked as Dhyana, have remained modest compared to the EPYC line of AMD, have seen adoption in China, including the support of Linux and Tencent nuclei developers.
Sugon has also used Dhyana processors in several systems, including a supercomputer that once held 38 position in the Top500 list.
While these chips are not along with the fastest processors in the world, they reflect a long data collaboration and a continuous impulse for Chinese alternatives.
In the political front, both Hygon and Sugon remain in the list of entities of the United States Industry and Security Office.
This designation restricts access to US technologies about national security concerns and raises questions about how much the new entity can innovate regardless of US intellectual property.
For now, the power and competitiveness of the new chip are still not clear.
However, the technical jump required to rival the Threadripper of AMD or Intel’s Xeon, often cited among the fastest CPUs in the world, is significant.
Through For it
