GBASE × Hygon: Software-Hardware Synergy Fortifies a Full-Stack Security Defense for Financial Data

2026-05-14

As data security regulations tighten and business analytics demands surge, the industry faces a common dilemma: how to maintain encryption compliance without sacrificing the massive analytical performance of the database. GBase 8a MPP Cluster (GBase 8a), a cloud-native data warehouse independently developed by General Data Technology Co., Ltd., has forged deep technical collaboration with Hygon CPUs to seamlessly integrate database encryption logic with Hygon's on-chip Crypto Co-Processor (CCP), creating a high-performance, security-hardened foundation that unifies software and hardware.

The Traditional Encryption Dilemma: Security or Speed?

With regulations such as China’s Cryptography Law, enterprises must encrypt sensitive data at rest. However, conventional encryption approaches typically fall into two traps:

  • Software-only encryption relies on the main CPU for cryptographic computations. It’s like asking a weightlifter to run while lifting—analytical performance inevitably slows down.

  • External encryption hardware offloads the CPU but requires data transfer over the network, introducing high latency, high cost, and complex scaling.

Is there a way to encrypt data without dragging down the database? GBase 8a and Hygon offer a fresh approach.

A New Approach: Offloading Encryption to a Hardware Co-Processor

Inside every Hygon CPU is a dedicated “workshop” for encryption and decryption—the Crypto Co-Processor. Through low-level adaptation, GBase 8a can hand off encryption tasks directly to this co-processor, freeing the main CPU to concentrate on data analytics. Security and processing no longer compete for resources.

How is this achieved? It’s simple: at startup, GBase 8a automatically probes the underlying hardware environment.

  • If a Hygon CPU is detected, it automatically enables “hardware acceleration mode”—encryption tasks are assigned to the dedicated co-processor.

  • If another CPU is detected, it seamlessly falls back to traditional software encryption, ensuring broad compatibility.

This design fully exploits Hygon’s hardware strengths while remaining perfectly functional on other platforms.

Real-World Results: Security and Performance Hand in Hand

Using industry-standard TPC-DS and TPC-H benchmarks at a 1 TB data scale, test results were striking:

Data loading scenarios (writing and encrypting data):

  • With AES-128 (a widely used international standard), performance improved by up to 212%.

  • With SM4 (China’s national cryptographic standard), performance improved by up to 114%.

  • In all cases, performance loss was kept within 4%.

Complex query scenarios (analyzing massive data sets):

  • With AES-128, performance improved by up to 124%.

  • With SM4, performance improved by up to 445%.

  • Performance loss was held within 3%.

In plain terms: with hardware encryption enabled, GBase 8a not only avoids slowing down—it often runs faster. This is encryption without compromise in action.

Stronger Together: From “Functional” to “Exceptional”

Both GBase 8a and Hygon are among the first products to pass China’s national security and reliability evaluation. From the database kernel down to the chip instruction set, each component is fully self-developed and controllable. The two parties have collaborated deeply at the foundational level, jointly defining the interaction standard between the database and the hardware encryption module, while fully leveraging GBase 8a’s distributed parallel computing and Hygon’s multi-core processor advantages.

This integrated hardware-software solution—built on a Chinese-developed database and CPU—constructs an end-to-end security chain from the hardware root of trust up to the data storage layer. It delivers a compliant yet highly efficient data security foundation for critical sectors such as finance and government.

The deep encryption adaptation between GBase 8a and Hygon shatters the myth that security must always come at the cost of performance. By offloading cryptographic computation to a dedicated on-chip coprocessor, GBase 8a secures data while even outpacing non-encrypted performance. This not only sets a benchmark for synergy among Chinese fundamental software and hardware, but also reassures organizations migrating to indigenous innovation platforms that both security and performance can be confidently entrusted to domestic solutions.