Alibaba Cloud has unveiled a new Arm-based processor design developed in house for use in its data centres. The server chips, named Yitian 710, are custom-built by Alibaba Group’s chip development business, T-Head, and will be used in its proprietary servers, called Panjiu. Alibaba said it expects to offer customers cloud computing services powered by the new servers "in the near future".
Built on advanced 5nm process technology, the Yitian 710 is powered by 128 Arm cores with 3.2GHz top clock speed to deliver exceptional performance and excellent energy efficiency. Each processor chip has 60 billion integrated transistors. Yitian 710 is the first server processor compatible with the latest Armv9 architecture and includes 8 DDR5 channels and 96-lane PCIe 5.0, providing high memory and I/O bandwidth.
According to Alibaba, the Yitian 710 achieved a score of 440 in SPECint2017 (a standard benchmark to measure CPU integer processing power), surpassing that of the current state-of-the-art Arm server processor by 20 percent in performance and 50 percent in energy efficiency.
Panjiu was developed for the next generation of cloud-native infrastructure. By separating computing from storage, the servers are optimized for both general-purpose and specialized AI computing, as well as high-performance storage. With a modular design approach for large-scale data centre deployment, these servers are expected to deliver exceptional economic value for a wide variety of cloud-native workloads, such as containerized applications and computed optimized workloads, Alibaba said.
During the launch event, Alibaba also announced that it will open the source code of the XuanTie IP core series, among other upcoming cores. The XuanTie series are Alibaba's custom-built processors based on RISC-V instruction-set architecture. Developers can access the source code of the XuanTie series IP cores on Github and Open Chip Community to build prototype chips of their own, which can be customized for IoT applications such as networking, gateway and edge servers.
In addition, XuanTie-related software stacks, which support multiple operating systems, including Linux, Android, RTOS and Alibaba’s own AliOS, will also be opened. Alibaba said it will provide more services and support for development tools, SDKs and customized cores in the future.
