Chinese bare metal and dedicated server purveyor, Alibaba Cloud, has unveiled a new customized-constructed processor referred to as the Yitian 710, a cloud-first, server CPU constructed on TSMC’s 5nm manufacturing course of (the identical as Apple’s new M1 Max and M1 Pro) with a staggering 60 billion transistors.
In comparability, Apple’s processor – the M1 Max – has 57 billion transistors, whereas the AWS Graviton 2 and the AMD EPYC Rome server processors have round 30 and 40 billion transistors every respectively.
Based on Arm’s v9 structure, the Yitian 710 packs a staggering 128 cores and might attain speeds of as much as 3.2GHz and helps as much as eight DDR5 reminiscence channels and 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes. We know that it’s a muti-processor platform as effectively.
The Yitian 710 achieved a rating of 440 in SPECint2017, which Alibaba Cloud claims surpasses that of the present state-of-the-artwork Arm server processor (in all probability referring to the Graviton2) by 20% in efficiency and 50% in vitality effectivity.
We don’t know whether or not it’s base or peak numbers, however at first look, the figures appear to be aggressive with what rivals have to supply. The processor will probably be rolled out in a new vary of house-grown servers referred to as Panjiu, all of which had been introduced at Alibaba’s annual Apsara Conference occasion.
During the identical keynote, Alibaba Cloud additionally introduced that it will likely be devoting more assets to constructing customized-constructed processors primarily based on the open-supply RISC-V structure in what appears to be like like an try to maneuver away from proprietary compute architectures.
The etching is on the wall
AMD and Intel will take observe that yet one more vendor has dedicated to constructing its personal server processors.
After Apple, Sberbank, Microsoft, Huawei, Amazon and Google, Alibaba has joined the fray and it’s probably that they gained’t be the final.
Nvidia can even – to a lesser extent – be involved by the different announcement, the proven fact that Alibaba Cloud will probably be investing closely in RISC-V, which is more and more being seen as a compelling different to the closed ecosystem that Arm has come to signify.
https://www.techradar.com/information/amd-intel-look-away-heres-a-new-128-core-rival-with-more-transistors-than-the-apple-m1-max