Alibaba $BABA risc-v
How big of a breakthrough is this really? Performance wise does it compete on a per watt basis for generic workflows? Specialized ones? #aws #baba #amd #intel #arm #datacenter #cpu #alibaba #riscv #gcp #azure #tech
How is this a breakthrough nothing in China is original
The US is sleeping on riscv .. they don't have to be original on an open source ISA, they just need to scale it up farther than anyone and it appears that they have As reported by HPCWire, the system, made using an indigenous Sophon SG2042 chip, is a gigantic 3,072-core server with 48 nodes that's been deployed at Shandong Univeristy in China. It's the first cloud-facing commercial server built with RISC-V processors. Each processor has 64 cores, with a 2GHz frequency, 64MB system cache and connectivity through PCIe 4.0. It means China has beaten the US in a key milestone in the race to expand the RISC-V ecosystem
All of these factors just tell you about the scale of the system, not any performance benchmarks.
Perhaps a more nuanced question. Can they compete with AWS graviton (which is also risc but via arm)? Does graviton shift from arm to risc-v?
Most likely takes time for compiler to mature and they don’t have the latest node size for the best, RiscV or Arm due to export ban reason. Arm isn’t sitting around doing no development.
I think the compiler will catch up very quickly since major vendors are already using riscv and with 0 license cost it'll take a chunk of arm business imho
True, but the long term power consumption is likely going to cost more than arm per core royalty. So that will still need some time to catch up.
T-head risc-v chips are not targeted for high performance data center yet. They're more for embedded device like the IoT business in EV car and the new SSD controller (the new Zhenyue 510 looks interesting, similar to what WDC does). Alibaba cloud has customized SSD controller before as AliFlash dual-mode SSD, so it's quite straightforward. T-head has Arm chips for cloud workload, the Yitian 710 ARMv9 chip. So they invest in both risc-v and Arm product lines. Another Chinese chip example is Sunway, they just refreshed SW26010-Pro at SC23 with tens of thousands nodes and millions of cores for HPC. But it's still not popular in data center. A long way to go.
Lol stock still in the shitter so you know what the market thinks
Market is not necessarily efficient