After years of rapid growth, HiSilicon is now the number one IC design company in China, and in 2013 generated $1.4 billion USD. The company was formed in Shenzhen in 2004 and has since set up offices in: Beijing, Shanghai, Silicon Valley (USA) and Sweden. They predominantly produce the Kirin series of processors for Huawei which is known for appearing in the Honor and Huawei Ascend series of phones. It is possible we may even see a Kirin Processor in the upcoming Nexus which is rumored to be manufactured by the Chinese company. While nothing has been officially confirmed, a Kirin chip in the upcoming nexus would make an interesting advancement for the brand. This would be a large blow for competitor Qualcomm who has made the possessors for the previous models. Much like we saw with the Xiaomi in our article, Huawei’s approach with HiSilicon appears to be growing the brand internally and locally until it is big enough and ready to branch out in to the larger world. Despite recent rumors, both Huawei and HiSilicon companies have confirmed that there are no current plans to separate.
Interesting. I never realised Huawei had its own chip maker.
Hisilicon Hi3518e is a killer chip. It is on these camera boards.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Pre-order-2-0MP-IP-Camera-Module-108…
$4.50 for the SOC and it includes 64MB DRAM in a multichip package. Runs Linux.
So for $11.40 shipped – you get Linux, 720P H.264 camera, Ethernet, USB, audio in/out, mic, uart, and support for IR cut.
http://nemon.org/ipcam-ipr1631x/
But instead I am using the Grain Media GM8138S which is very similar and $6. It supports 1080P, has 128MB DDR in package and has I2S support. It also doesn’t need a heat sink like the HI3518e.
Western world should look for other cpus..not this kirin (IMHO)
Wich ones?
The russian Elbrus family: Elbrus-8C, Elbrus-2SM, Elbrus-4C(ÐльбруÑ-8С, ÐльбруÑ-2С+, ÐльбруÑ-4С).
http://espacial-org.blogspot.com.es/search/label/Microprocesadores (in spanish)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus_%28computer%29
The chinese mips compatible family Loongson/Godson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
Why? I would like to know why you’re saying that, is there some good reasoning you could share?
As european i dont like the actual situation where most (99%) of our IT environment is designed in USA and assembled in China…making a very big security hole…chances of backdoors appear by design…and..by modification of the design by the assembler.
Loongson architecture, like many others, opensparc, openpower is a possible alternative to x86.
Elbrus on the contrary…is highperformance sparc fork with x86 emulation capabilities, russians already showed a w2k system running emulated on an Elbrus computer years ago.
Everything …far of NSA/FBI/CIA/DARPA/whatever_usa_organization_you_like_more must be more secure.
I forgot to mention that we have here, the LEON cpus, but mostly are designed for be radiation tolerant..im sure its possible to make them run faster without that radiation protection.
Might want to explore your logic there. These may be far from the NSA/CIA/FBI, but if you think for an instant that Russia and China do not have the same capabilities you are impossibly naive. I don’t much care for our current IT situation either, but I don’t see your alternatives as any better, but rather just trading one crap chute for a different one.
I need to point that “ARM Holdings plc” is a british company. But is true sad the IT industry landscape is Europe, most companies sold themselves to the motto of externalization and deslocalization, and the governments where happy ignoring the tactical implication to not retain its capabilities nationally both in economic and military aspects.
And exactly how would security be improved by the Russians and the Chinese?
Although I totally agree there’s no reason to assume a supplier from any particular country will be more secure, there’s an argument that heterogeneity enhances privacy. From a privacy perspective I’d rather have multiple countries with partial data than one country with all of the data.
Although it would maybe be more like multiple countries with all the data.
Yeah, you’re probably right.
Although there may be valid concerns about manufacturing variety, I’m not sure ICs are the first thing to look at if you’re worried about privacy anyway. There are much easier and richer ways to collect personal data.
Either way, it was interesting to read about the process types neuechristian highlighted. The Kirin is still ARM ISA, so less exotic than the Elbrus or Longsoon from my perspective.
At high level? Reverse ingenieer on all architectures.
At low level? Deploying diferent system with diferent architectures but with software developed for same results…and comparing the diferences in the input/outputs, if all inputs/outputs are the same…we can asume is clean.
Actually Ebrus is a name for a group of CPUs with different ISAs.
The Elbrus-3M1 computer that you saw booting windows was the VLIW version that supports x86 emulation acceleration similar to what Transmeta used to do.
In fact most of the Elbrus named chips are VLIW at this point and they started naming the Sparc ones MCST-xxxx.
Shameless plug for my sparc32 Gentoo images: http://gh0stwriter.net/gentoo/
Are any of those mobile SoCs? They sound more like desktop CPUs than mobile SoCs.
Just because i still prefer to work on a workstation rather than do it on a smartphone
Nope. Elbrus is not a high volume commercial product. While you can buy motherboard it is not a good value.
X86 emulation is such a stupid idea now. Waste of time.
Any modern ARM SoC will run circles around it (even vs. native VLIW mode).
Hope we’ll have our first ARMv8 processors soon.
HiSilicon on the other hand will have high-end 32-core ARM chips within the months.
Yes, world’s fastest ARM SoC ever created.
http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/02/16/hisilicon-d02-armv8-server-b…
D02 server board can fit two SoC with 2×32 high-perf ARMv8 Cortex-A57 cores with up to 128GB RAM.
Edited 2015-03-07 02:15 UTC
The first board of Linaro’s 96boards initiation seems to be based on this CPU: https://www.96boards.org/products/hikey/ So it’s available for developers.
Come on Thom. For someone from a country where lots and lots of people ride Bikes (pedal powered) you missed a great opportunity to mention the ‘Kirin’ even in cycle track racing.
lots of going round in circles folloing a moped then a burst of speed towards the finish with a high probability of some crashes. Sounds a bit like modern CPU’s then.
(te-he)
While HiSilicon generally has very good CPU core designs:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8425/huawei-honor-6-review/4
Their GPU core implementations in Kirin are very poor:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8425/huawei-honor-6-review/6
Even a MT6595 offers much better overall performance than a Kirin 925. Note that the Kirin 925 is fairly new compared to the MT6595:
http://oizoioi.com.my/blog/2014-octa-core-phone-benchmark-race/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vahpOtMNjoY
At the moment, I’d take a MediaTek over over a Kirin any day. The upcoming Kirin 930 is rumored to be using the same anorexic GPU as in the 925:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiSilicon#KIRIN_930
The MT6752, which is a midrange CPU, comes with at least a Mali-T760:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaTek#Octa_Core
Any deeply chinese electronic device I have found so far, be it a DVD reader, a BT joystick or a USB serial port, had awful documentation, awful software and awful update policies. Maybe to sell that cheap you cannot invest in hordes of programmers doing a good job; but most such devices soon ended in the trashcan, which turned them out to be not cheap at all.
I fear that with HiSilicon devices you will experience weird bugs that will never be cured, and you will kiss goodbye any timely OS updates.
Not that Qualcomm, Nvidia or Samsung race to be the first to update their drivers, but stil…
Wait until after the laser slicing where it will be compared with other products to determined who they copied it from