Not banned for individuals, only banned for use by organizations that require to be NDAA Sec. 889 compliant (Fed Gov, and the organizations they deal with, think contractors). This comes from someone who works in the defense industry and has to deal with Sec 889 way more than I like lol.
The last time I touched anything from Huawei was back in something like 2010, when we were trying to figure out how some of our source code looked like itd ended up in "not our systems" lol
I heard a story of a company that got very good prices for some of their network kit. They had some sort of weird overnight network traffic and realised the network stuff was sending documents from their servers to China.
Lol, same experience about 10 years ago. I was a software dev for custom linux based dvr's for IP camera's and found out a chinese company ripped off our software and a support agent that worked for the company was hired by them ... happens more often that people realize
@@johnh1353 That sounds more plausible--Huawei hiring somebody that used to work for another company to get IP from them--rather than a 'backdoor to China' that has never been proven.
20:18 I recognize that heatsink and have like 100 of them in my parts drawer. It's gotta be the design with the highest manufacturing volume in the world and I see a few more of them on the motherboard/card in the background. That's why it's oversized.
Just wanted to say that I loved the "steel cables are cheaper than a visual effects budget" note. Totally true, and it looks great. Ignore the naysayers, keep doing what you're doing because it is fantastic.
im glad you reviewed it and informed people about what's inside when only testers and leakers would have this info. i wonder if server fans will ever switch to magnetic ring driven type fans .
Huawei really seems to put more effort into details in general than a lot of companies. I really love that the connectors on the fans are as all connectors should be, a little more accuracy in connectors would really go a long way for a lot of manufacturers! Although extending beyond their impressive servers, their Honor phones were on point, especially when it came to camera sensors and batteries! I got my wife an Honor phone, 7X I think, a few years back before the general Huawei ban, and the camera on that thing was absolutely phenomenal. And the battery averaged 2 days of use before needing a charge. They were doing big boy stuff at little boy prices, and I absolutely love that. I've recently charged that phone again and may use it along with a few other old phones for a security cam setup. It'll give me much better quality security for a much cheaper price than a dedicated non-cloud-based setup would!
Those RTL8211F chips aren't PCIE ethernet controllers. They are just transcievers and they need separated controllers for MAC layer stuff. The 4-port OCP3 NIC is probably the hns card shown in the lstopo output.
They actually provide a lot of those cores on their own cloud services publicly (not really cheap, though), so I think these cost-saving measures can be justified by their high internal demand. Also, I have heard from one of my friends that these servers are kind by hard to work with bare-metal. Looking forward to seeing the actual performance and process of working with these.
I've got an older (2014 BIOS date) Huawei server RH2288H V2, that was a decommissioned server from my employer that I now run as a VM host at home. Dual Xeon E5-2650v2, 288GB RAM and 48TB disc space (4TBx12). Not too bad for a freebie. Of course, the iMana controller card isn't connected to my LAN, I don't want it phoning home to Shenzhen. I've given it a static IP that I can connect a laptop to back-to-back if I want to talk to it.
they work okay as isolated media servers and the like, so long as they can't get out to the internet. or you limit them to only being able to connect to specific servers via whitelist.
HiSilicon is the chip design branch of Huawei, so obviously Huawei servers uses HiSilicon CPUs. That Hi3052 BMC chip is likely a modified Huawei smartphone processor. They make phones too, so it makes sense to just develop their own BMC from that. (Depending on which phone processor they used as the basis, this may be the BMC with the best GPU performance out there.)
@ServerTheHome - LSI/Avago/Broadcom Mezz cards are pretty standard variant for their raid controllers (Dell/Cisco SKUs.) 1. Saves PCIe "physical slot" for customer/server. 2. Saves space on the motherboard.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Looks like an ODM agreement. Standard Industry practice and not a confidential information (PS: Worked for both LSI/Avago and Cisco on these controllers ;))
This is like a unicorn the fact that it has two solder in processors as well as a real Technic I'm blown away I didn't even think real tech existed any further be sides their audio
I miss Huawei. Their Mediapad m3 was top notch. Great feel, best split screen at the time, clean UI, and the fastest connecting to wifi of anyone. Just a second or 2 every time. Too bad Apple and the feds killed their huge carrier deals at the last minute.
@@fibbs01 I left mine in a coop bathroom and a homeless guy ran off with it. I couldn't check the room and accuse him at the same time. I've been regretting it ever since. Just can't justify buying another. Mine was mounted on my dash with magnets when I drove for Uber. Even the Apple heads were asking what it was. Especially with Uber and Spotify in split screen below my in-car nav. It was a sweet setup.
That bmc is real interesting. I'd love to have the opportunity to poke around at that thing. I definitely get why Huawei would want to source something like that internally. Def an interesting product. Not that I'd ever recommend anyone buy one. But it's interesting to Huaweis take on the market
@@ServeTheHomeVideo you might want to dig up the info regarding discontinued x86 servers from v6 gen. Unfortunately Huawei no longer keeps much info about them.
For the weird network card, is it perhaps 4 discreet pcie connections so you need to make sure to enable the bifurcation on that slot? Might be a cheap alternative to SR-IOV network adapter, you just passthrough individual adapters instead into VM?
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Maybe the intel/broadcom chips are produced in Taiwan and are under sanction? Or it's one of those chinese "save a dollar here, save a dollar there... until it almost falls apart" kinda cost saving measure?! ;)
I got a giggle that you, "liked," the Realtec NICs, that is very funny. Kind'a reminds me of when used Pac-Bell differential SCSI drives were sold at Fry's -- academically interesting, not for production, haha.
Interesting and very informative for people who need cheap old 2nd hand server (in developing country)... In some developing country 2nd hand x86 server is still very unaffordable...
In regards to that heatsink I would guess thats where the CPU cores might be so thats where the heat transfer is concentrated. The rest of that huge package being just IO and not putting out much heat. For the BMC might they not be rolling with their own implementation for national security reasons?
There is a reason that company is banned in countries. In China there is no "Private Sector" Everything is owned by the PRC, therefore it wouldn't surprise me a bit to find out that there is "Phone Home" data collection software embedded into the hardware.
As a security researcher...I'm interested. I haven't been keeping track of things well enough to know what "Banned" means in this case. I always assumed that these were high level "No GOV use" or "Generic import volume restriction" situations. What did you have to do to get this through customs? I'm considering getting one, or something like it, so I can do some analysis.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo I assumed as much. I'd planned to just find a used seller in a market that had them. My question was more "Are they ACTUALLY banned at the border, like a brick of heroin?" Or is it more like "Do you have a reason for buying this? Fill out this form please."
@@Prophes0r Not like smack but almost. Huwai equipment was found to contain backdoors and was used to steal data for the chinese govmt. therefore determined to be a national security risk and the company is banned from doing business with us corporations and their hardware is banned from all gov and many other enterprise uses. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Huawei#:~:text=Huawei%20has%20also%20faced%20allegations,in%20violation%20of%20U.S.%20sanctions.
I'd love to see a continuous pcap file on the Ethernet. I gave taken out some Huawei telecom equipment but I've never gotten my hands on a server and would have a field day connecting this with some 5G radios in the lab see just what is phoning home to the CCP and when this is actually in play.
I hate US protectionism. It makes prices higher for most. In the rest of the world there are loads of cellphone brands competing. In the US it's just a few US brands and Samsung.
Hey - what's with the time-stamps? Otherwise great video. I did see Kuenpeng (?) CPU couple of times - though only in videos and photos. China does have 7nm technology with DUV, which is similar to TSMC N7. The problem is that it requires a lot of multi-patterning passes. But it's still very good for what they need. And as long as Chines companies can buy other stuff - well I don't blame them for going with something that is faster and uses less energy. And while this has some "weird" characteristics, I wouldn't say that it doesn't look like a server. It's just different and if you have ability to have a lot of spare parts, I don't see a lot of problems with running it.
Hisilicon did great CPUs for mobile as well. If they hadn't been sanctioned from using TSMC we'd have seen some amazingly performant ARM v9 5nm ones with many more cores.
@@yurymleh It's quite probable that we would. There is tons of talent in China, technology has to catch up, but who knows what they will be doing in 10-20 years?
Looking at that Kunpeng 920 I can't help but see what to me looks like a design/copyright year 2007 and a manufacturing year of 2008 as well as TW for Taiwan. But I'm sure I'm wrong and those markings means something else... Back in 2008 that would have been a smoking server...
So basically it's like a quad rasp pi 4 server,ARM is under rated unfortunately most regular people don't use Linux based system, but hopefully with steam decks the market will change
the arm cpu thing has me curious enough I want to get one to play with, but finding something like a pi 4 right now is a pain in the butt unless you want to pay scalper prices, and as much as I like mac (I own 2 mac pro's) I don't want to buy one of the m1 mini's.
There's something called the entity list, where if a foreign person, corp, gov, etc is listed on it, trade of a specific technology to a US based entity becomes way harder. Banned is a bit of an exaggeration, and it me took a hot minute to simplify down some legalese in a mostly correct form, which is also kind of why everyone kind of treats this stuff as "banned".
Fantastic, Patrick. Thank you so much for doing this. Ive been looking for a review of these servers for about a year now. Can you now review a server with Ascend chips? Perhaps the Atlas 800? Thank you!
I remember back in July 2020 when a Chinese RU-vid channel was able to buy and review a Workstation motherboard with the KunPeng 920 8-core ( /watch?v=Q99ccKqG3bA ). Between that platform and whatever Raptor Computing offered with POWER9, I was hyped and excited. A shame the US-China trade war threw Huawei's efforts into the bin. I would have really bought a KunPeng PC like the one I saw back then.
I remember my former workplace got one of these in to test before the US put the whole kibosh on that company. Interesting looking server, even if I never got to play around with it myself. Last I saw, it had been pulled from the R&D datacenter and was likely headed back to Huawei. They wouldn't have been running it with any sensitive customer data on it anyway, but they probably saw the writing on the walls and decided to pull it early to prevent any blowback from public sentiment.
And it's banned for a very good reason. Anyone installing that into their network that values their companies intellectual property needs their head examined.
I actually think using cheap 4x Realtek NIC for quad 1Gb card is a good option. Things like SR-IOV, super low latency or storage and encryption offloads are overrated and not used as often as people think. If you care about performance you will go with 25Gb NIC anyway, or some other specialized solution. Also it is OCP, so nothing stops you putting something else there.
As another person mentioned, it's possible that the card uses a x16 slot because each NIC is actually a separate PCIE 3.0 device, and bifurcation has to be enabled. I doubt it's that big of a deal, but we are talking about 4x the part count, and significantly more lanes being used. So, you have power consumption and failure risk versus cost. That said, I'm not against it. Just looking at it from a different perspective. As that person mentioned discreet network adapters mean they can be assigned to VMs without having to deal with SR-IOV.
Do DCs actually vet what the processors are in machines you put in their facilities? We install all sorts of exotic hardware that I am sure our DC folk wouldn't know what was inside.
@@ServeTheHomeVideo Huh that's unusual. I've got all sorts of random stuff including water cooling loops in my Hurricane Electric data center and they never questioned me. I've also seen people store old oscilloscopes and other junk in their cabinets.
That heat sink is just bad design and so is the gap between the fan and the air guides. Goes to show they pretty much took off the shelf parts. If it were me I would try to lap the heat sink side to lower that plane so it's flat all the way across that way you can cover the whole CPU to increase the thermal interface. Additionally when you have a gap between your guides and your fans you have an opening releasing force so in a sense it becomes dead space significantly reducing flow. But you probably could not it in some way in closing the gap increasing flow. But between the fans the guides and the heat sink flaws really bad thermal design.
I can tell you exactly why there's a gap. Something I learned some years ago, is that the most efficient way to use a box fan for your window, is not to put it in the window, but a couple of feet in front of it, blowing at the window. Sounds counterintuitive, but you move more air through the window that way, than having it in the window. Those fans are blowing directly at the opening the air is to go through (I could see the airflow arrows on the fans, so I know I'm right). I'm really amused with the mechanism to close the fan off when it stops...it's simply brilliant!
In your scenario, its more efficient because the flow of the air coming out of the fan also pulls in the surrounding air, increasing the total volume of flow. However this isn't the case with the server as there is no surrounding air, the server fans in this scenario are already "placed in the window" and so flow from them doesn't suck in additonal air.
I do believe that a PSU that accepts a set voltage rather than have to deal with many input voltages is better = less to go wrong and higher efficiency and performance (less to go wrong or waste energy) its not like your travelling alot with these things right?
Just more market options if you support both voltages, most of the world uses 220-240v. But the US has 110-120v for majority of receptacles, and a 240v or two, maybe. Server PSU's supporting 120v just means smaller businesses without a real server closet with 240v and PDUs and UPS', can still use (buy) the server without additional install costs. it's flexibility.
Arm v8 relatively new, sucking up, relatively prior gen as in old but understood, maybe in this example. Battery back up in a tray r power caps out? KP needs more package area to pull off the heat is an all encompassing known these days? I think so. Did u interrogate Hi Silicon BMC finish the eval. Broadcom grey market? Black market? Out of China SMT and system integration? 2 kW per tray that's interesting. Ampere Q low core count at 80 something like that is the only price cost effective I did that calc 9 to 12 months ago. TSMC price to Ampere on massive multicores is not cost : price / margin effective I explained that to Ampere 9 months ago I think, maybe 12. Good report. mb
That's actually a beautiful piece of machinery right here :) Did you have to travel all the way to Europe/Asia to get one of those illegal bad boys? Have a great weekend and keep the videos coming
Does that 4x 1GbE card still function but not show up in lspci? Or does it not work at all? It sounds like they are leveraging x4/x4/x4/x4 bifurcation at x1/x1/x1/x1 since I don't see any PCIe switch chip on there.
Microsoft's NSA Key!!!! Or the "Megatrands" chips. They need to just start labeling everything like that. What's real, and what's a supply chain attack? Who knows.
Aren't those the Realtek chips that are *notorious* for being hot steaming piles of garbage? Pretty sure I had to go through like 3 motherboards when I built my last PC before I realized that dropping connection, huge spikes in latency, and high CPU usage and instability under load were just "working as expected" for those RealSh*te NICs and went with a board that had 10gig from some other vendor lol.
