All-round product implementation, Feiteng realizes the rise of domestically produced CPUs

Annual sales volume exceeded 1.5 million units, and annual revenue exceeded 1.3 billion yuan.

In this exceptionally cold winter, Tianjin Feiteng Information Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Feiteng") has used its outstanding achievements to tell the world that the hot era of domestically produced CPUs has truly arrived.

On December 29, 2020, Feiteng held the 2020 Feiteng Ecosystem Partner Conference in Tianjin. More than 1,500 people including government leaders, industry experts, industry associations, user units, software and hardware manufacturers, system integrators, and media attended the conference to discuss with Feiteng the development plan of domestically produced CPUs.

The time has come

"The right time, the right place, and the right people" are the three conditions that must be met for success. Domestic CPUs, which are at home, have always had the right place and the right people, and now the "right time" has also arrived.

The year 2020 is a year of explosive growth in the demand for new infrastructure in China. The scale of applications such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, 5G communications, and digital cities has emerged. The coordinated development of the information industry based on underlying core computing power and covering from end to cloud, and the construction of a secure and reliable system have become the development direction of the future computing industry.

Unlike in the past, domestically produced CPUs have begun to play a major role in this wave of market explosion. "CPU chips, as an important component of high-end general-purpose chips, are the key link in adhering to scientific and technological self-reliance and breaking the chronic disease of "chip shortage". They are in an extremely core position in information systems and are the basis for efficient and safe operation of office and business systems." Chen Ximing, member of the Party Leadership Group and deputy general manager of China Electronics Information Industry Group Co., Ltd., pointed out the strategic position of domestically produced CPUs in his speech at the conference.

Feiteng seized the opportunity and delivered a good report card: it currently has about 1,600 partners, has completed the design and support of 924 projects for 423 partners, and has completed adaptation optimization and certification with 2,557 software from 851 manufacturers; it has released more than 90 industry joint solutions with ecological partners, covering telecommunications, finance, energy, transportation, medical care, digital cities, industrial manufacturing and other industries. In the tide of domestic substitution, Feiteng CPU has achieved full product implementation. 

On the technical level, the ARM architecture to which Feiteng CPU belongs also ushered in a breakthrough highlight in 2020. The M1 chip released by Apple at the end of 2020 proved with its excellent performance that the ARM architecture can also play a big role in the desktop market. In the server market, which is almost monopolized by X86, ARM chips have also opened a gap. Amazon uses its own server chips based on the Arm architecture, and companies such as Ampere have also launched a new generation of products.

Dr. Zhang Chengyi, deputy general manager of Feiteng, believes that this will have a positive impact on Feiteng. "The general trend has been formed, and with this trend, many things will come naturally."

As long as the ARM desktop and server ecosystem is established, it will drive development talents, software ecosystem and users to ARM, and at the same time will drive the larger-scale application of ARM architecture CPUs in China. For Feiteng, which has been developing CPUs since the 1990s, it has finally ushered in the best era.

All-out attack

Taking advantage of the momentum, Feiteng launched a comprehensive attack on product layout.

At present, Feiteng has three major product families, corresponding to embedded CPU, desktop CPU, and server CPU. The high-end embedded CPU product line is named as the Tenglong E series, providing customized solutions that fit all walks of life and embedded applications; the high-performance desktop CPU product line is named as the Tengrui D series, creating a high-performance, high-security single-user ultimate experience; the high-performance server CPU product line is named as the Tengyun S series, providing strong computing power and high concurrency for server and data center applications.

At this ecological conference, the desktop series Tengrui D2000 was the new product launched by Feiteng.

According to Feiteng's deputy general manager Guo Yufeng, Tengrui D2000 integrates 8 high-performance processor cores FTC663 independently developed by Feiteng, which are compatible with the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set, have a main frequency of 2.3~2.6GHz, a TDP power consumption of 25W, and support Feiteng's self-defined processor security architecture standard PSPA 1.0, meeting the performance and security requirements in more complex application scenarios.

Compared with the previous generation CPU FT-2000/4, the SPEC2006 int score of Tengrui D2000 is 97.45, nearly twice the original score. SPEC2006 FP, Stream, and Unixbench performance have also been improved to varying degrees. Desktops, notebooks, industrial computers, network security equipment and other terminal products based on Tengrui D2000 will be launched in Q1 2021.

With Tengrui D series as the core, Feiteng also launched the first generation of desktop platform solution - Dongting platform, which is Tengrui D series chip + Feiteng chip set X100. This platform can make customers' solutions more integrated, more reliable and less expensive, while accelerating the development progress and improving the localization rate.

The roadmap for servers and embedded CPUs was also revealed at the conference. According to the latest introduction, Feiteng's next-generation CPU for data centers will use the new FTC860 core, based on the ARMv8.2+ instruction set architecture, providing up to 128 cores, supporting 2-4 parallel paths, and a single system supports 512 cores.

In terms of performance, single-core performance can be improved by 50%, SpecCPU2006 score exceeds 25 points, computing performance is improved by more than 1 times, SpecCPU2006 score exceeds 1000 points, memory performance is improved by more than 60%, and I/O performance is improved by up to 15 times.

For embedded systems, the Tenglong E2000 series is planned to be launched in the second quarter of 2021, supporting PSPA 1.0. The Tenglong E3000 series will be released in the third quarter of 2022, integrating rich I/O interfaces and supporting PSPA 2.0.

According to Zhang Chengyi, the embedded CPU adopts a flexible architecture concept, including a large and small core design that takes into account both performance and power consumption, a highly integrated SoC that covers most commonly used interfaces, and differentiated configurations that are suitable for multi-scenario applications.

In view of the future development of processors, Feiteng is also conducting various forward-looking research and investments. Heterogeneous processors, silicon-based optical communications and optical computing, and quantum computing have all entered its planning map.

Expand your circle of friends

"In the past, people who made domestic CPUs basically just worked on their own and only talked about product performance. But in fact, making CPUs is all about the ecosystem. The more applications and users gather around your product, the bigger and stronger it will naturally become." Zhang Chengyi pointed out the purpose of Feiteng holding the Ecosystem Conference.

Feiteng is really dedicated to building an ecosystem. In order to better empower ecosystem partners, Feiteng has reached in-depth cooperation with many leading AI companies to jointly build a full-stack Feiteng AI Ecological Joint Laboratory. At the meeting, Feiteng and 25 other manufacturers including Kylin Software, Bitmain, Baidu, Baode, and Beijing Institute of Computer Technology and Applications jointly launched the Feiteng Artificial Intelligence Ecological Joint Laboratory to jointly promote the implementation of AI solutions based on the Feiteng platform, accelerate the deployment of the AI ​​ecosystem, build a computing "synergy", and better and faster empower AI capabilities to thousands of industries, and promote the vigorous development of new infrastructure.

Many new servers and embedded products released at the conference are the result of Feiteng's ecological construction. 15 domestic manufacturers including China Great Wall, Inspur, Tongfang, Sugon, and ZTE released multi-way server products based on Tengyun S2500, and 10 domestic manufacturers including Ruijie, Great Wall Financial, China Electronics Intelligence, Hanwei, Hengwei, and Blue Torch released embedded products based on Feiteng CPU.

Zhang Chengyi believes that Feiteng has no tricks in building an ecosystem. "Building an ecosystem means insisting on openness and cooperation. To put it bluntly, it means making more friends."

It is reported that Feiteng will invest 1 billion yuan in strategic industry fields in the next five years. For nine major fields such as education, transportation, and medical care, the company will select 5-10 partners in each industry to support them in new product research and development, software and hardware adaptation and optimization, and promote the accelerated implementation of industry joint solutions to achieve a win-win situation for both parties.

In addition, Feiteng will also focus on school-enterprise cooperation and technical talent training this year, and officially released the Feiteng training certification system. This system has been jointly certified by Gongxin Talent and Feiteng, and 15 projects have been signed with 11 universities including Xi'an Jiaotong University, Hunan University, University of Electronic Science and Technology, and Tianjin University.