Alibaba has a plan to boost the usability of its servers through its latest server chip that makes use of 5-nanometer technology. The Yitian 710 is reportedly compatible with the newest Armv9 architecture.
Alibaba Aims to Build Server Chip For AI Computing
HANGZHOU, CHINA - OCTOBER 19 2021: A view of the ARM-structure server processor Yitian 710, developed by Alibaba's in-house semiconductor unit T-Head, at the Apsara Conference, an annual cloud service technology forum hosted by Alibaba Group, in Hangzhou in east China's Zhejiang province Tuesday, Oct. 19, 2021.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the Chinese tech titan is headed towards creating a custom silicon that is based on Arm's micro-architecture. The company said that it would sell the chip for commercial purposes at the moment.
Alibaba said that the Yitian 710 was built for custom by T-Head. It has 128 Arm cores. In addition, it also features a 2.2GHz fast clock speed. Each processor inside it contains 60 billion transistors, as well as 96-lane PCIe 5.0 and even eight DDR5 channels.
The e-commerce firm pointed out that Yitian 710 was its first processor to have an Arm's V9 compatibility. The data centers would benefit from this development.
"Customising our own server chips is consistent with our ongoing efforts towards boosting our computing capabilities with better performance and improved energy efficiency. We plan to use the chips to support current and future businesses across the Alibaba Group ecosystem," Jeff Zhang, the president of Alibaba Cloud said.
Furthermore, Alibaba DAMO Academy head added that the said chips would be utilized to extend cloud service support for customers in the "near future."
Alibaba Eyes to Produce Proprietary Servers
The Chinese vendor shared its plans to develop Panjiu, the newest set of servers that would adopt Yitian 710. According to the company, the creation of the proprietary servers would pave the way for efficient energy usage and performance optimization.
Alibaba has not disclosed the particular details about the availability of the chip. Zhang said the tech giant would rely on other chip manufacturers such as NVIDIA, Intel, and more.
Besides the announcement about Yitian 710, Alibaba has made XuanTie CPU core's open source available. For developers, you can access the code from the Open Chip community and Github.
The multinational tech firm noted that the Internet of Things (IoT) apps would adopt the customization of the CPU architecture. These applications include edge servers and gateway.
In 2020, Alibaba mentioned that it would focus on the development of cloud business. The investment reached $31.07 billion or 200 billion yuan. At that time, the company guaranteed that it was planning to release its plans for the deployment of proprietary technologies, ZDNet reported.
China Plans to Develop Powerful Cards
In July, a Chinese developer claimed that its 66-qubit Zuchongzhi quantum computer could surpass Google when it comes to performance. From eight years, the said computer could accomplish the task for just about 70 minutes.
In another news, Tech Times reported that Jingjia Micro was preparing to release two new GPUs that could rival GeForce GTX 1080 and AMD RX Vega 64.
Related Article: China's Alibaba Unveils World's Most Powerful RISC-V Processor Xuantie 910
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Joseph Henry
