Alibaba Cloud unveils the Yitian 710, a server processor designed by Alibaba Group’s chip developer T-Head. It is an Arm CPU with 128 cores, DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 support. Alibaba Cloud will use the CPUs in its data centers.
The Yitian 710 is made on an undisclosed 5nm process and achieves clock speeds of up to 3.2GHz, Alibaba Cloud writes. It is an Arm processor based on the Armv9 architecture, with eight DDR5 memory channels and 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes. The processor consists of sixty billion transistors.
According to the Chinese company, the Arm server processor achieves a SPECint2017 score of 440. The manufacturer claims that the performance is 20 percent better than other state-of-the-art Arm server processors and that the chip is 50 percent more efficient. Alibaba does not show concrete comparisons with other processors.
Alibaba Group will use the Yitian 710 in its proprietary Panjiu servers. With its own Arm processor, the Chinese data center giant follows Amazon, among others, which makes Graviton socks for its AWS data centers. Those are also Arm processors. Alibaba already made its own neural processing unit for AI calculations. That Hanguang 800 npu was announced in 2019.
Furthermore, the Alibaba Group is releasing the design of its XuanTie cores. These are cores based on the RISC-V architecture. By making that open source, the company hopes that specialized chips will be designed by third parties for applications such as network equipment, gateways and edge servers. T-Head, the chip division of Alibaba, said it had already delivered two billion chips with XuanTie cores by the end of 2020. These can be found in security cameras and smart home products, among other things.
Yitian 710 Processor from Alibaba Cloud