AMD, Intel, look away - here’s a new 128-core rival with more transistors than the Apple M1 Max
Alibaba Cloud enlists the help of Arm to produce a powerful server processor
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Chinesebare metalanddedicated serverpurveyorAlibaba Cloudhas unveiled a new custom-built processor called the Yitian 710, a cloud-first server CPU built on TSMC’s 5nm manufacturing process (the same asApple’s new M1 Max and M1 Pro) with a staggering 60 billion transistors.
In comparison, Apple’s processor - theM1 Max- has 57 billion transistors, while the AWS Graviton 2 and theAMDEPYC Rome server processors have around 30 and 40 billion transistors each respectively.
Based onArm’s v9 architecture, the Yitian 710 packs a staggering 128 cores and can reach speeds of up to 3.2GHz and supports up to eight DDR5 memory channels and 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes. We know that it is a muti-processor platform as well.
The Yitian 710 achieved a score of 440 in SPECint2017, which Alibaba Cloud claims surpasses that of the current state-of-the-art Arm server processor (probably referring to the Graviton2) by 20% in performance and 50% in energy efficiency.
We don’t know whether it is base or peak numbers, but at first glance, the figures seem to be competitive with what rivals have to offer. The processor will be rolled out in a new range of home-grown servers called Panjiu, all of which were announced at Alibaba’s annual Apsara Conference event.
During the same keynote, Alibaba Cloud also announced that it will be devoting more resources to building custom-built processors based on the open-sourceRISC-Varchitecture in what looks like an attempt to move away from proprietary compute architectures.
The etching is on the wall
AMD andIntelwill take note that yet another vendor has committed to building its own server processors.
Are you a pro? Subscribe to our newsletter
Sign up to the TechRadar Pro newsletter to get all the top news, opinion, features and guidance your business needs to succeed!
After Apple, Sberbank,Microsoft, Huawei,AmazonandGoogle, Alibaba has joined the fray and it is likely that they won’t be the last.
Nvidiawill also - to a lesser extent - be concerned by the other announcement, the fact that Alibaba Cloud will be investing heavily in RISC-V, which is increasingly being viewed as a compelling alternative to the closed ecosystem that Arm has come to represent.
Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.
Best free and public DNS server of 2024
Zoho turns to Nvidia NeMo to build proprietary LLMs
Smeg Combi Steam Oven review: a multi-functional countertop oven that looks stunning and cooks well
