GBASE × HIGON | GBase 8a Custom Edition for HIGON Processors Officially Released

As the digital economy accelerates, high-volume data analytics has become a strategic imperative across virtually every industry. The question is no longer simply whether a data warehouse is usable, but whether it delivers performance, efficiency, and security at scale. This is the challenge that foundational software and hardware vendors must tackle together.

Recently, GBASE (General Data Technology Co., Ltd.) and HIGON Information jointly launched the GBase 8a Custom Edition for HIGON processors. This release represents a full-stack, deep integration between GBase 8a MPP Cluster—GBASE's cloud-native data warehouse—and HIGON's CPUs. From the underlying architecture to the end-user experience, the new edition delivers a comprehensive upgrade, setting a new benchmark for performance and security in the domestic data warehouse space.

A Powerful Alliance
Building a Domestic Data Infrastructure Together

GBASE and HIGON Information signed a strategic cooperation agreement in April 2025, committing to deep collaboration in joint R&D, adaptation, and market development around database products and ecosystems. The launch of this HIGON Custom Edition is a key milestone in their software-hardware co-innovation efforts.

As a leading domestic database provider, GBASE has always prioritized independent R&D, maintaining full control over core technologies and source code. GBase 8a supports leading operating systems—both domestic and general-purpose—including Kylin 10, CentOS 8, and RedHat 8 (kernel 4.19 and above). HIGON Information, a major force in domestic high-end processor development, delivers x86-compatible CPUs. Together, they offer a complete, independently controlled technology stack—from chip to database.

Three Core Upgrades
Unlocking the Full Potential of the Platform

Performance Leap: 2×+ Improvement, Within Reach

Download: https://www.gbase.cn/download/gbase-8a?category=INSTALL_PACKAGE

The GBase 8a Custom Edition for HIGON fully exploits the multi-core parallel processing capabilities of the HIGON C86 architecture through fine-grained, full-stack tuning spanning hardware, firmware, OS, and database kernel. At the core is a new vectorized execution engine. At the source-code level, it restructures the execution path using streaming computation, vectorized processing, and SIMD instruction sets. Compared to the previous express engine, business performance improves by 2× to 10×.

Real-world benchmark data confirms the gains. In TPC-DS-based testing with a 1TB dataset and 99 SQL serial executions, the HIGON Custom Edition delivered more than 2× performance improvement. Analytics tasks that once took hours can now be completed in significantly less time, giving businesses a faster path to data-driven decisions.

In head-to-head comparisons against a leading international database (DorisDB) under identical conditions—1TB dataset, four-node ZTE servers—GBase 8a outperformed by 15% in TPC-DS testing and performed comparably in TPC-H. These results demonstrate that domestic databases can compete head-to-head with established global products.

Additionally, the new release incorporates an intelligent routing mechanism. When the vectorized engine encounters unsupported functions, it automatically falls back to the express engine, ensuring uninterrupted business operations and providing a reliable safety net.

Accelerated Security: Hardware Encryption with Near-Zero Overhead

Data security is non-negotiable for any data warehouse. However, traditional software-based encryption often comes at the cost of performance degradation. The GBase 8a Custom Edition for HIGON offloads encryption and decryption workloads to the dedicated cryptographic coprocessor (CCP) built into HIGON CPUs, moving these operations off the main CPU cores and executing them in parallel on dedicated hardware. It supports SM4 (China National Cryptographic Standard), AES-128, and AES-256 algorithms.

Benchmark results are compelling:

• In data loading scenarios, performance overhead with both AES-128 and SM4 is under 4%.

• In complex query scenarios (TPC-DS and TPC-H), encrypted performance improved by 14% to 445% , with performance overhead likewise within 3%.

• This enables truly "high-performance encryption with near-zero overhead."

Out-of-the-Box Deployment: One-Click Pre-Checks and Intelligent Tuning

The new edition ships with automated pre-deployment check scripts that validate the database environment and perform performance tuning on HIGON CPU platforms. The scripts automatically collect server model, BIOS version, OS, and kernel information; inventory hardware resources including CPU cores, NUMA topology, and memory distribution; and inspect critical system configurations such as swap, transparent huge pages, disk scheduler, firewall, and SELinux. Based on total system compute capacity, the script dynamically calculates optimal parameters and completes instance configuration tuning automatically—dramatically reducing deployment complexity and operational costs.

The launch of the GBase 8a Custom Edition for HIGON marks a significant milestone in the ongoing software-hardware co-innovation between GBASE and HIGON Information. Going forward, the two companies will continue to deepen their technology collaboration, refining a high-performance, secure, and easy-to-operate end-to-end data analytics foundation that helps organizations across all industries move their data warehouses beyond mere usability—toward true efficiency, performance, and security.