Friday, April 15th 2022
Alibaba Previews Home-Grown CPUs with 128 Armv9 Cores, DDR5, and PCIe 5.0 Technology
One of the largest cloud providers in China, Alibaba, has today announced a preview for a new instance powered by Yitian 710 processor. The new processor is a collection of Alibaba's efforts to develop a home-grown design capable of powering cloud instances and the infrastructure needed for it and its clients. Without much further ado, the Yitian 710 is based on Armv9 ISA and features 128 cores. Ramping up to 3.2 GHz, these cores are paired with eight-channel DDR5 memory to enable sufficient data transfer. In addition, the CPU supports 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes for IO with storage and accelerators. These are most likely custom designs, and we don't know if they are using a blueprint based on Arm's Neoverse. The CPU is manufactured at TSMC's facilities on 5 nm node and features 60 billion transistors.
Alibaba offers these processors as a part of their Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance called g8m, where users can select 1/2/4/8/16/32/64/128 vCPUs, where each vCPU is equal to one CPU core physically. Alibaba is running this as a trial option and notes that users should not run production code on these instances, as they will disappear after two months. Only 100 instances are available for now, and they are based in Alibaba's Hangzhou zone in China. The company notes that instances based on Yitian 710 processors offer 100 percent higher efficiency than existing AMD/Intel solutions; however, they don't have any useful data to back it up. The Chinese cloud giant is likely trying to test and see if the home-grown hardware can satisfy the needs of its clients so that they can continue the path to self-sustainability.
Source:
The Register
Alibaba offers these processors as a part of their Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance called g8m, where users can select 1/2/4/8/16/32/64/128 vCPUs, where each vCPU is equal to one CPU core physically. Alibaba is running this as a trial option and notes that users should not run production code on these instances, as they will disappear after two months. Only 100 instances are available for now, and they are based in Alibaba's Hangzhou zone in China. The company notes that instances based on Yitian 710 processors offer 100 percent higher efficiency than existing AMD/Intel solutions; however, they don't have any useful data to back it up. The Chinese cloud giant is likely trying to test and see if the home-grown hardware can satisfy the needs of its clients so that they can continue the path to self-sustainability.
18 Comments on Alibaba Previews Home-Grown CPUs with 128 Armv9 Cores, DDR5, and PCIe 5.0 Technology
www.anandtech.com/show/15578/cloud-clash-amazon-graviton2-arm-against-intel-and-amd
I seriously doubt they can catcup with n2 cores in less than five years!
So...100% optimistically is low power. As in a 60 watt TDP for a 120 watt wall draw is about 50%...so a "100% more efficient" chip would take in 120 watts, and only have a 30 watt TDP. That's relatively easy if you've got a low power operation, highly parallelized, with the focus on operation quantity and not operation completion times.
That said, I've seen this before. Remove the whole politics, and this is a permutation of the old RISC versus CISC argument. CISC does more in less steps, less efficiently. RISC does less in more steps, but more efficiently. It's a wonder this level of shenanigans in advertising is still tolerated. I thought people already understood this...because it's not like we've seen ARM and the like get anywhere near replacing x86 in desktops.
it's basically like the Mac M1-M2 vs the current AMD/Intel. relatively same perf in almost everything at like half the power draw.
If anything, the arm cpu are at a point where they can easily beat anything intel/amd produce that is still x86 standard.
Alibaba is just doing the design (probably with TSMC staff doing the actual work), and use TSMC manufacture. Alibaba is not actually making anything themselves.