Alibaba Previews Home-Grown CPUs with 128 Armv9 Cores, DDR5, and PCIe 5.0 Technology

[AleksandarK]

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.


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[Deleted member 24505]

That's quite a processor

 

[chodaboy19]

Interesting socket mechanics, does the heatsink protrude into the cavity?

 

[aQi]

Major push from China

 

[defaultluser]

Well, at least we should be able test it soon (as soon as they make these cloud compute instances available, someone else can pull an Anandtech.)

Amazon's Arm-based Graviton2 Against AMD and Intel: Comparing Cloud Compute

www.anandtech.com

I seriously doubt they can catcup with n2 cores in less than five years!

 

[lilhasselhoffer]

So, anyone else read this and immediately think that this metric (as stated in the article) is traditional Chinesium bologna?


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.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Interesting socket mechanics, does the heatsink protrude into the cavity?

I was wondering that too.

 

[Fouquin]

Interesting socket mechanics, does the heatsink protrude into the cavity?

Very likely. Similar to the socket design Cavium used for their ThunderX2 LGA chips.

 

[Batailleuse]

what most people here seems to miss is that those CPU are ARM based. so yeah ... They are power efficient.

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.

 

[R-T-B]

what most people here seems to miss is that those CPU are ARM based. so yeah ... They are power efficient.

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.

ISA is not as big a deal as most users here assume it is. Certainly not from an energy efficiency perspective. It's a drop in an increasingly large bucket, and the ARM ISA isn't really that small anymore.

 

[watzupken]

This looks like it is going to hurt Intel’s sales further since Intel has the lion share when it comes to enterprise/ data Center CPU market share. The more Intel pushes the power envelop to deliver sustained high level of performance, the less attractive they will become despite them offering higher performance per core.

 

[eidairaman1]

This looks like it is going to hurt Intel’s sales further since Intel has the lion share when it comes to enterprise/ data Center CPU market share. The more Intel pushes the power envelop to deliver sustained high level of performance, the less attractive they will become despite them offering higher performance per core.

It took them 6 gens just to catch up to Ryzen and the core i are hot n heavy chips

 

[phanbuey]

It took them 6 gens just to catch up to Ryzen and the core i are hot n heavy chips

True - this is why I don't think their plan is to catch up anymore... They're shooting to build the tile chips and just buy/license and just slap competitor's chips onto that structure.

 

[Bomby569]

There is nothing better than necessity, all the US efforts to control China just made them shift to their own development, less money to the US. It's also more competition something that is always good.

I hope Europe would do the same.

 

[Denver]

There is nothing better than necessity, all the US efforts to control China just made them shift to their own development, less money to the US. It's also more competition something that is always good.

I hope Europe would do the same.

Competition ? lol

I thought that after Putin attacked Ukraine, everyone had learned that giving money to the governments of expansionist dictators is not a good thing.

China's only interest is to reduce dependence on other countries so that in case of attacking Taiwan or another country they can resist possible sanctions.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

And how long did it take AMD to catch up to Core2Duo? 10 years, 15? means nothing, a big thing just because its Intel catching up this time. They're not really catching up though, 1 chip is not a win. We will have to see what Am5 is like against Intels next CPU after ADL, then it will be more of a even test.

 

[Bomby569]

Competition ? lol

I thought that after Putin attacked Ukraine, everyone had learned that giving money to the governments of expansionist dictators is not a good thing.

China's only interest is to reduce dependence on other countries so that in case of attacking Taiwan or another country they can resist possible sanctions.

Another sanctimonious post, seems to be a trend lately. I'm assuming if you turn whatever keyboard, mouse, laptop, phone, monitor, whatever you used to write that, there were no chinese made parts because you know, "giving money to governments of expansionists dictators is not a good thing". You don't eat bananas because they destroy the rainforest, no sport brands that use kids labour in bangladesh, etc...

Do you guys have like a cult or something?

Oh and are we only doing expansionist dictators or do we include mudering jornalists, opressing minorities, occupying illegal territories, etc... just asking? There goes Saudi oil, US shit and Israeli crap.

 

[Denver]

Another sanctimonious post, seems to be a trend lately. I'm assuming if you turn whatever keyboard, mouse, laptop, phone, monitor, whatever you used to write that, there were no chinese made parts because you know, "giving money to governments of expansionists dictators is not a good thing". You don't eat bananas because they destroy the rainforest, no sport brands that use kids labour in bangladesh, etc...

Do you guys have like a cult or something?

Oh and are we only doing expansionist dictators or do we include mudering jornalists, opressing minorities, occupying illegal territories, etc... just asking? There goes Saudi oil, US shit and Israeli crap.

Not. We just use our brains and don't support dictators who oppress their own people. In my opinion, all these countries with dictatorships would have already been overthrown, but as it is not possible for now, we in the free world can at least try to control the biggest and most dangerous on the list. If you don't understand the difference between China and any other small country with the same regime, it's best not to get into this discussion.

It seems a joke that there are still people with this mentality, luckily most still think like me, and Putin insanity opened the eyes of many. Absolutely nothing you say will justify the violations that take place in these countries. period. Please, if you don't like the USA, stop using a device, internet and OS created there. Thank you.

 

[bogmali]

Thread cleansed and take your political garbage elsewhere-it doesn't belong in here.