Chinese ecommerce and cloud titan Alibaba has teased a new chip that stacks reminiscence and processing in a 3D orientation for the primary time.
As initially reported by two Chinese publications, Pandaily and ScienceNet, the chip is the product of labor on the DAMO Academy (brief for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook), a analysis and growth (R&D) unit at Alibaba.
If stories are to be believed, the novel structure permits the processor to beat the notorious von Neumann bottleneck, which describes the pace limitations created by the interior bus that passes information between the processor and memory.
TechRadar Pro requested Alibaba for affirmation of those claims and additional element concerning the new chip, but didn’t obtain an speedy response.
Alibaba semiconductors
Various workarounds for the von Neumann bottleneck have been developed by semiconductor designers, similar to deploying cache reminiscence between the CPU and essential reminiscence. The structure of Apple’s M1 sequence of chips, in the meantime, bypasses the difficulty by putting the processor and reminiscence on a single system-on-chip (SoC).
However, for computer systems with discrete processing and reminiscence (which encompasses most private gadgets), the bottleneck continues to pose appreciable challenges. A chip that would handle this drawback, then, would inevitably be in excessive demand.
However, though little or no is understood concerning the new Alibaba chip (together with its title), it’s unlikely to make its technique to client gadgets. Instead, it will nearly actually be deployed in assist of Alibaba’s bare metal and dedicated server choices, which have been a main focus for the agency over the past couple of years.
As famous by The Register, the corporate can be set to ship a presentation on “3D logic-to-DRAM hybrid bonding” as a part of a sequence on machine learning chips for rising functions at a semiconductor convention subsequent yr, which provides one other clue as to potential use circumstances.
The mysterious new chip is under no circumstances the corporate’s solely thrilling mission within the semiconductor area, both. In October, Alibaba Cloud unveiled a {custom} Arm-based server CPU referred to as the Yitian 710, which boasts a whopping 60 billion transistors and 128 cores.
For context, Apple’s most performant processor (the M1 Max) has 57 billion transistors, whereas top-tier AWS Graviton 2 and AMD EPYC Rome server CPUs have roughly 30 and 40 billion transistors, respectively.
During the identical occasion, Alibaba additionally introduced it shall be devoting extra sources to constructing custom-built processors based mostly on the open-source RISC-V structure, in what seems like an try to maneuver away from proprietary compute architectures.
https://www.techradar.com/information/this-new-cpu-overcomes-an-historic-computing-bottleneck-but-youll-never-guess-who-made-it
