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Huawei is planning a 256-core CPU monster to take on AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon range but it won’t land till 2028 – at least that’s the official line

Wayne Williams

22 September 2025

Benchmarks show the Kunpeng 960 is already being trialed in multi-socket servers

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Huawei outlines Kunpeng roadmap with CPUs scaling to 256 cores by 2028
Benchmarks show processor referred to as Kunpeng 960 delivering 4.8 million TPM
SuperPoD built on Kunpeng 950 aims to replace legacy mainframes in financial sector

Huawei has outlined plans to expand its Kunpeng processor family with models that scale up to 256 cores by 2028.

“In the first quarter of 2026, we will unveil the Kunpeng 950 processor in two models: one with 96 cores and 192 threads, and another with 192 cores and 384 threads,” Huawei’s rotating chairman Eric Xu said in his keynote speech at its recent Connect 2025 event in Shanghai.
These processors will support the TaiShan 950 SuperPoD, which can include up to 16 nodes and 48TB of memory.

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Kunpeng 960
Built on the Kunpeng 950, the SuperPoD will be “the world’s first general-purpose computing SuperPoD,” Xu added.

It is being presented as a replacement option for legacy mainframes and mid-range computers still used in the financial sector.
With GaussDB, Huawei’s distributed database system, the SuperPoD can provide a reported 2.9x performance boost without requiring modifications to existing setups.
Xu suggested this could make it a candidate to replace systems such as Oracle’s Exadata.

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Looking further ahead, Xu confirmed Huawei is planning a 256-core processor.
“In the first quarter of 2028, we plan to introduce two models, including a high-density design with at least 256 cores and 512 threads,” he said.
This chip is intended for virtualization, containers, big data, and warehouse workloads.

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A second model will focus on higher single-core performance, improving by more than 50% for AI and database use cases.
Performance benchmarks from MogDB, the open source database based on openGauss, suggest Kunpeng can scale effectively in large deployments.
Using Memory Optimized Tables, a 256-core Kunpeng setup achieved 4.8 million transactions per minute with 768 connections, illustrating how workloads improve as concurrency rises.
What’s interesting is that although Xu didn’t name the processor during his keynote, in the benchmarks it’s referred to as the Kunpeng 960. That would make sense, as Huawei already uses the 960 designation across its Atlas and Ascend product lines.
Huawei said it will continue refining the Kunpeng microarchitecture and packaging technology.
If delivered as planned, the 256-core processor would mark one of the largest general-purpose CPUs available.
While the official 2028 target seems reasonable, I do wonder if the existence of those benchmarks means Huawei is further ahead of schedule than we’ve been led to believe and the chip might arrive sooner.
We’ve reached out to Huawei to find out more about the Kunpeng 960, but we’re not holding our breath.
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Wayne Williams

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Wayne Williams is a freelancer writing news for TechRadar Pro. He has been writing about computers, technology, and the web for 30 years. In that time he wrote for most of the UK’s PC magazines, and launched, edited and published a number of them too.

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Want a quad-socket server with 768 cores? Sure, Intel’s 192-core Diamond Rapids Xeon CPU will deliver that in 2026 — but I wonder whether it will be too little, too late

Huawei throws massive 1-million NPU gauntlet at Nvidia and AMD as it positions itself an alternative to US AI giants

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‘Final nail in Intel’s workstation coffin’: AMD ThreadRipper Pro 9000 rips through Intel’s Xeon in a desperately one-sided review

AMD ThreadRipper Pro 9995WX breaches 175,000 points on CPU Mark, 5% faster than the EPYC 9755 and 21% quicker than the 7995WX

AMD ThreadRipper PRO 9995WX could sell for $13,000 — yes, it’s over 2x the price of the 96-core EPYC 9655 and I just wished Intel had a direct competitor

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