Huawei wants to enter the desktop PC market?

Huawei would seem willing to join the desktop PC market. The company has indeed published the details on one desktop motherboard – designed at home – able to host its ARMv8 “Kunpeng 920” processors, aimed at the server sector.

These chips will be available in versions with four and eight 7-nanometer cores for desktop motherboards, but there is the potential to go up to 64 cores e support PCI Express 4.0 if you look at the server offer. Recently it emerged that the Mate 30 smartphone does not contain components of US origin and apparently the clutches between China and the United States are pushing Huawei to develop more and more alternatives to American solutions.

Since Huawei can count on the support of the “British-Japanese” ARM, which grants it the basic architectures under license, the option to create solutions at home is always on the table. As for the aims in the desktop, they are not formally declared, but the project may have solid foundations to start.

Motherboards, not to mention HiSilicon’s Kunpeng chip, are interesting. According to the published specifications, the Kunpeng Desktop Board D920S10 supports PCIe 3.0 interface, six SATA 3.0 interfaces and two M.2 SSD slots. The memory consists of a four-channel DDR4-2400 interface that supports a maximum of 64 GB of capacity (ECC support is not missing).

The card has an integrated Ethernet controller and of course supports additional network cards up to 25 GbE. For daily connectivity, here are also four USB 3.0 and four USB 2.0 ports, meeting all the requirements of a desktop PC.

Huawei’s website also indicates the company will offer reference guidelines for creating compatible homes, cooling and power supplies. Currently Huawei talks about support a Linux and use in offices, but given that Microsoft has opened Windows 10 to ARM chips, it cannot be excluded that if relations between China and the United States were to become less tense, there could be developments in this direction.