Alibaba Cloud plans for a fifth of its servers to use homebrew Arm CPUs by 2025

Alibaba Cloud has revealed that it plans to power 20 percent of its operations with its own homebrew CPUs by 2025. The Chinese cloud champ unveiled its Yitian 710 server-class CPU in 2021. In early 2022 the operation started trials of the devices and offered more info about its specs: 128 Armv9-compatible CPU cores, clock …

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

A cunning plan

Now that the USA have cut off Nazi Germany's supply of helium for their Zeppelins - the Luftwaffe will be powerless

[Justthefacts]

Specint chasing….

I actually want to like this chip. But they’ve shoved 128 cores on, without scaling the size of shared L3 cache. That flatters the Specint benchmark (small numerical kernels, designed to measure core and not stress memory size or bandwidth), but will starve on more practical applications.

Both a 128-core Yitian and 16-core Epyc have 128MB L3 cache. The Epyc has 8MB per core, the Yitian 1MB per core. Below 4MB per core, the cores will stall significantly waiting on main memory….which is especially unfortunate as the DDR5 memory is then only going to have a quarter of the bandwidth *per core* as a more reasonable 16 or 32-core device.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Specint chasing….

I guess a lot depends on the "real" planed workload for the CPU. For iterative calculations of yields that are generated by military gadget's, cached data from other cores would be used more often than cache misses. But for each CPU core if it is used to transmit/receive, process data to/from Internet clients then it is currently totally insufficient. How well it will work, depends on the needed flow of data and how much actual processing will be done by each core on that data. If the processing is high enough compared to the memory access delays then the memory access delays becomes less important.

[druck]

Rogue One?

Are they licencing these chips from ARM or the rogue Chinese venture?