In addition to security, mobile phones and AI, Huawei's chip layout is unknown to you.　

Recently, Huawei has released its self-developed ARM server chip, as well as Lingxiao CPU and Wi-Fi chips. According to media statistics, Huawei now has chip layout in many fields such as security, mobile phone processor, artificial intelligence and so on.

Author | Editor Liu Diqing | Luo Lijuan

Huawei's own Kirin chip has always attracted much attention, among which Huawei's Kirin 980 chip represents the first echelon level of chip manufacturing in China. However, Huawei's chip research is not only limited to mobile phone chips. From the recent releases, we can see the overall layout of Huawei's chips, including routing chips and ARM server computing chips.

On December 26, Huawei Glory held a new product launch in Beijing. In addition to releasing new mobile phone products, Huawei Glory also released a variety of accessories, including the new generation of Glory Routing Pro2. It is worth noting that this glorious routing Pro 2 is equipped with Huawei self-developed two-chip Lingxiao, which has achieved independent research and development on CPU and Wi-Fi chips, and has become the first domestic router to achieve full self-research on two chips.

The "Lingxiao 5651" has been upgraded to four cores with a main frequency of 1.4 GHz. It is said that the data forwarding performance has been improved four times. At the same time, it is equipped with self-developed Lingxiao 1151 Wi-Fi chip, 256 MB large memory and independent application acceleration core. It is worth mentioning that one of the four cores is an IoT acceleration engine independently, which can establish a dedicated Wi-Fi channel for smart appliances and maintain stable connection and fast response. When Glory Mobile Plays Hand-Tour, it can also establish exclusive channels, mobile phones and routers enter the game mode at the same time, reducing delay and jitter.

In the past, routes CPU suppliers were basically monopolized by the giants such as Qualcomm, Unicom, Marvell and Broadcom. Now Huawei's strong participation will undoubtedly bring impact on the new market structure.

According to the Q3 quarter and the first half of 2018 wireless router market survey report of Zhongguancun Online, Huawei's brand attention is gradually increasing, and the brand gap with TP-link is getting smaller and smaller. Although TP-link still ranks first, the proportion of attention is only 22.21%, compared with 29.48% in the first half of the year, the attention has dropped by nearly a quarter. However, Huawei's attention has increased rapidly, reaching 102% annually, which has greatly narrowed the gap between Huawei and TP-Link.

On December 21, Huawei held an Intelligent Computing Conference and China Intelligent Computing Business Strategy Conference in Beijing. In addition to officially announcing that its server product line was upgraded to Huawei Intelligent Computing Business Department, Huawei also officially released an ARM Server Computing Chip of "Hi1620", which unveiled the Arm Server Chip previously in the "fog". It is reported that "Hi1620" is positioned as the world's first data center with a 7-nm process using an ARM processor, which is scheduled to be launched in 2019. At the same time, Huawei plans to officially launch the world's first smart SSD management chip "Hi1711" in 2019.

More than routing and ARM-based servers, according to the incomplete statistics of Semiconductor Industry Observation, Huawei currently has a layout in security, handset processors, network switches, artificial intelligence, vehicle navigation, multimedia, interface IP, wireless terminals, home devices, SSD control and power management. It is also rumored that Huawei is studying ARM PC processors for computers.

In fact, Huawei has been working hard in the field of chips for a long time. In 2004, Huawei relying on its Hess Semiconductor Company entered the chip industry. At that time, the media quoted people familiar with the situation as saying that when Hess was founded, it spent 400 million US dollars (about 3 billion RMB at that time) on R&D for one year.

With Huawei's years of hard work in the field of communications, Heise's first 3G network card chip has blossomed in the world, and has entered Vodafone, Deutsche Telecom, France Telecom, NTT DoCoMo and other top global operators. According to media reports, in the era of 3G, Huawei achieved a total sales of about 100 million pieces of 3G chips, and Qualcomm, the chipmaker at that time, occupied about half of the market share.

In the era of 4G, Hess released Balong 700 LTE 4G chip in 2010, and made it into terminal devices such as network card and home wireless gateway. While Qualcomm is commercially available in the United States, Hess chip is commercially available in Europe. Originally dominated by international manufacturers in the chip industry, Heis is now standing at the same level.

Nowadays, there are more and more entrants on the chip track, including Apple, Samsung, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, even Gree, Kangjia and Haixin.  As the problem of terminal homogenization becomes more and more serious, enterprises realize that they need to use self-developed chips to solve this problem.

In this area, Huawei has spared no effort in its performance. Hu Houkun, chairman of Huawei's rotating board, said at the annual report conference held in March this year that Huawei's R&D investment in the past 10 years was nearly 400 billion yuan, and that it would still maintain this intensity for the future.

Some people close to Huawei said that about 40% of the research and development of chips, that is, the investment in chip research and development may be about 160 billion.

In 2017, Huawei's R&D investment amounted to 89.7 billion US dollars, equivalent to 13.2 billion US dollars, of which R&D investment accounted for 14.9% of Huawei's total revenue. In mid-July of this year, Huawei explicitly mentioned that in 2018, Huawei's R&D expenditure will increase to between $15 billion and $20 billion (102.861 billion to 137.148 billion).

Ren Zhengfei, the founder and President of Huawei, has publicly declared that "there is no enterprise that will last forever, but as long as it keeps innovating and transforming, it will prosper forever. Huawei will continue to research on technology. In this age of technology eating people's bones, no technology will kill us."