[HN Gopher] Alibaba Open Source XuanTie RISC-V Cores, Introduces...
___________________________________________________________________
Alibaba Open Source XuanTie RISC-V Cores, Introduces In-House Armv9
Server Chip
Author : sanatgersappa
Score : 322 points
Date : 2021-10-21 01:41 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fuse.wikichip.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (fuse.wikichip.org)
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| Gamechanger
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Is C910 out in the wild? Are there any dev boards with it?
| brucehoult wrote:
| https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003395978459.html
|
| There were only 10 publicly available from the first batch, out
| of I think a total of 80.
|
| I managed to snag one. Hopefully I'll have it mid November.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| So I assume that they didn't open source their leading RISC-V
| core because they were giving up on RISC-V, but instead because
| they have something better, more powerful in the pipeline.
|
| Does that mean that we are going to see soon a data center class
| RISC-V chip with hundreds of RISC-V cores? That would really be
| something.
| sidkshatriya wrote:
| Could it be that they genuinely want people to use these
| designs and grow an ecosystem around it?
|
| When there are more eyeballs looking at something it can become
| better.
| heian0224 wrote:
| A new 'Weex',like Alibaba before, boast to the sky.
| tryptophan wrote:
| >>if we compare it to some recent measurements of Ampere Altra,
| AMD EPYC, and Intel Xeon, taken by Andrei over at AnandTech, the
| Yitian 710 should be fairly competitive at 128 cores.
|
| Impressive. I did not expect riscv to progress so quickly. Intel
| is much weaker than we all thought after all. Hats off to these
| clever engineers.
| jpgvm wrote:
| To be fair these are fabbed at TSMC and TSMC has been kicking
| Intel's behind for some time now.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" The Yitian 710 integrates 128 custom-designed ARMv9 cores"_
|
| That one isn't a RISC-V chip.
| maxpert wrote:
| Intel is gonna be in deep trouble in couple of years. They are
| the PowerPC of modern era. IDK what held them back from
| reimagining the architecture for less power hungry processors and
| tooling. With Mac mainstream switching to ARM and Microsoft doing
| something similar, I think within next 5 - 10 years ARM is gonna
| take over Intel architecture in general.
| urda wrote:
| The world is rapidly being consumed by ARM, it will be
| interesting to see how this plays out from hardware offered on
| market, to what devs are targeting when conducting builds.
| snuser wrote:
| That feels like a bit of a stretch their core CPUs are still
| very competitive, they are planning on manufacturing ARM chips
| as well
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > IDK what held them back from reimagining the architecture
|
| They'd been successful for decades, were raking in cash, and
| remembered the last time they tried something new AKA Itanium
| AKA the itanic AKA the most mocked architecture of all time.
| It's a failing, but I can totally understand how they got
| there.
| tsechin wrote:
| Classic innovator's dilemma. They're retreating up-market.
| swalsh wrote:
| I'd counter with the opposite sentiment. If Intel's foundry
| play pays off, they will still be big and important. All these
| companies designing chips need a place to manufacture them.
| While Intel's own chips might be decreasing in marketshare,
| they still have an opportunity to get a tiny sliver from of
| everyone's pie... and that pie keeps getting bigger.
| micv wrote:
| Contract manufacturing won't have anywhere near as fat a
| margin as their CPU lineup has had the last decade though.
| That'd be a hard thing to sell to the shareholders.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Apple is using their own cores, Google is using thei own cores,
| Amazon is using their own cores, I bet Microsoft is next...
| Eventually these new chips will hit the desktop and then we'll
| see the x86 start to sink.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| They were at the top of the pyramid, that's what happened.
|
| Same as when Microsoft had IE6, or the French phone market
| company was a one provider deal, or when Blackberry was eating
| the smartphone market.
|
| They stop to innovate. They milk the cow.
|
| It works for some times, then a new guy arrive in town, Firefox
| for IE6, Free for French Telecom, iPhone for Blackberry...
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It's easy to mistake the obvious computing market for the whole
| of the computing market. Servers dominates the computing
| market, and x86 is still dominating the server world, and Intel
| is still competitive on the server front.
| sidkshatriya wrote:
| > Servers dominates the computing market
|
| I would wager mobile semiconductor revenue worlwide is bigger
| than server semiconductor revenue worldwide.
|
| But I agree with you that Intel is still dominant in the
| server world.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| I wonder if Intel would see the obvious from a safe distance
| and play to their strengths instead of a death for pride.
|
| Imagine, if Intel would swallow their pride and start building
| ARM SOCs... they could show their engineering prowess, and use
| X86 synergies to their advantage. As a buyer, I'd buy ARM cpus
| from intel if they also provided me a slow path for legacy x86
| workloads that I haven't migrated yet. Also, ADM is just the
| ISA, so, once a customer locks in to intel's ARM cpu ecosystem,
| I'm sure they'll come up with lots of special additions that
| then the customer would be hesitant to walk away from.
|
| Or, they could be this decade's IBM and make x86 look like the
| next generation's mainframes - niche, even great in some
| dimensions but out of mainstream use.
| rank0 wrote:
| Are you comparing ARM to x86 or Intel chips specifically? Intel
| could design their own ARM chips...it's an architecture family
| with a SUPER wide variety of implementations.
|
| Everyone seems to be excited about the newer AMD chips which
| are x86.
|
| ARM is nice for low power, low performance workloads like
| embedded, phones, and laptops.
| yokoprime wrote:
| Isn't pretty much all modern x86 cpu's ARM at their core
| anyways, or am i missing something? The big deal about Apple
| scilicone is how its an all-in-one and obviously having
| things compiled for arm in the first place helps
| ElectricalUnion wrote:
| > arm at their core
|
| Most modern "CISC" processors internally are composed of
| RISC-like elements with instruction decoders in front.
|
| ARM is a specific almost-RISC instruction set architecture.
| codezero wrote:
| Intel is counting on being nationalized.
| dragonelite wrote:
| pretty much they are getting a lot of support from US
| government. To the point that Samsung and TSMC have to open
| their order books so the US can "inspect" them. Most likely
| to snatch away clients or better insight in material usage.
| easygenes wrote:
| Macs are still a relatively small (but profitable) chunk of the
| computing world. The ground Intel has lost in desktop and
| mobile is more than made up for by their utter dominance in
| server. Intel also has a lot of plays that should bear fruit in
| holding or retaking ground on consumer compute in the next few
| years:
|
| 1) Arc GPUs. Looks like they will be seriously disruptive.
|
| 2) Hedging their process node bets by using TSMC too. The only
| magic in the wins AMD and Apple have had the last few years
| have been in them being effectively a manufacturing process
| node ahead of Intel.
|
| 3) Intel will likely be first to market with getting a large
| set of on-package memory that serves as a bridge between CPU
| cache and DRAM in terms of latency. Think 8GB+
|
| I am no Intel partisan. My core interest is actually more in
| seeing performant, open (that is, blob-free [1][2]) hardware.
| RISC-V and Power10 [3][4] are what I am looking at in that
| regard.
|
| I expect the reports of Intel's impending descent to be largely
| exaggerated. Still, it is good drama to fuel a hearty compute
| war. That is to the benefit of all, so have at it.
| 1: https://raptorcs.com/content/base/faq.html 2:
| https://www.osnews.com/story/133093/review-blackbird-secure-
| desktop-a-fully-open-source-modern-power9-workstation-without-
| any-proprietary-code/ 3:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power10 4:
| https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/09/08/ibm-introduces-
| power10-based-server-the-power-e1080-targets-hybrid-cloud/
| londons_explore wrote:
| Intel can also play the "government please help us, we're
| critical to national security" card...
| caskstrength wrote:
| I agree with your assessment in general, but why do think Arc
| GPUs will be "seriously disruptive"? If anything, they seem
| to be too late to the party.
| krageon wrote:
| > utter dominance in server
|
| Things are hesitantly shifting towards a more AMD-oriented
| lineup now. The enormous kickbacks and discounts don't
| (always) weigh up to the increasing performance differences.
| girvo wrote:
| > The only magic in the wins AMD and Apple have had the last
| few years have been in them being effectively a manufacturing
| process node ahead of Intel.
|
| While I mostly agree with that, the fact that Intel are also
| moving to a chiplet-style architecture that AMD adopted
| beforehand means I think there is at least _some_ other bits
| AMD was ahead of Intel on aside from purely the process node.
|
| I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable about this stuff as others,
| but from my understanding from Dr Ian Cutress' articles and
| YouTube channel, Intel is somewhat following AMD in this
| area. I could be misunderstanding, of course.
| [deleted]
| easygenes wrote:
| No, that's pretty accurate. Though it could be argued that
| it was only the move to the smaller process node that
| necessitated a chiplet architecture (as a means of
| spreading the thermal density, and to improve yield in a
| more hostile process).
|
| Also, Intel's tiling tech is more versatile than chiplets.
| Though AMD is adopting TSMC's SoIC, which should be
| comparable. https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-believes-
| its-tiles-are-a...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Ctrl+F'd Graviton and found disappointingly few results.
|
| The server marketplace is shifting, slowly, but it is
| happening.
| forgotmyoldname wrote:
| Macs are a small market, but Apple definitely sets trends.
| Once they adopt a technology, people "know" it works and it's
| safe to switch.
|
| If servers can run on cheap ARM hardware that uses less
| electricity and runs far cooler without much of a performance
| difference, that's a massive improvement. Electricity savings
| would more than justify a switch. Apple has shown that it's
| possible at the desktop/laptop level. Now they or someone
| else can prove it works at the server level as well.
| easygenes wrote:
| For most purposes, electricity is almost a rounding error
| in datacenter asset management concerns. Server compute is
| expensive. It is all about performance. ARM is just
| starting to get competitive in that ballpark. So we will
| see.
|
| All of these ARM server chips are going to be very low on
| the pecking order for TSMC fab time, so they won't have the
| edge that Apple had by buying up the first slot on the
| latest manufacturing node. Even being a process node ahead,
| M1 only just squeaks by with comparable single threaded
| performance to Zen 3 cores, so ARM still has some catching
| up to do in the performance realm.
| tdrdt wrote:
| _" For most purposes, electricity is almost a rounding
| error in datacenter asset management concerns."_
|
| I don't think this is true. It is not only power
| consumption but also power backup. If you can use smaller
| diesel engines and smaller battery packs this will lower
| the cost.
|
| And why do you think datacenters have been raising
| temperatures? It saves a ton of money: https://www.datace
| nterknowledge.com/archives/2008/10/14/goog... HP
| estimated they saved 8 million. That is not a rounding
| error.
|
| A server that uses less power will also generate less
| heat.
|
| I have to admit it is years ago I worked for a company
| owning datacenters but at that time the highest costs
| were always: power and connectivity.
| easygenes wrote:
| That article cites a 100,000 sq. ft. data-center as the
| source for that $8 million savings estimate, along with
| roughly a 30% power savings figure. No mention on the
| period, so presumably it would be a TCO for the servers
| going into the initial buildout.
|
| 100,000 sq. ft. is roughly enough space for about 250,000
| 1U servers. Say conservatively the servers are in the
| ballpark of $2,000 each. That's $500 million just in
| server hardware costs. If the total electric cost is
| around 3*$8 = ~$24 million over their lifetime, then
| we're talking about <5% of just the server expenses.
| Never mind the facility and staff costs (and, as you've
| said, connectivity).
|
| So maybe not a rounding error, but way down the
| priorities list.
| [deleted]
| klelatti wrote:
| These are AC costs not total costs and the $8m is
| probably an annual figure - although it's not clear.
| easygenes wrote:
| Yeah, unfortunately it's a bit vague on the period. It is
| not unreasonable to assume an annual figure, in which
| case you're looking at something closer to 20% of the
| server costs for A/C power (assuming an average life of
| about 4 years).
|
| Problem is, that sounds high... the coefficient of
| performance for chillers is around 4 to 7 [1]. That puts
| ~15-30% of the total energy demand from chillers, though
| often datacenters do budget a factor up to about 60% of
| equipment power demand for cooling power demand. Sum
| energy related expenses for datacenters tends to be
| around 10-15% of the total costs [2]. So it would be odd
| to have such high cooling costs. A TCO over 4 years seems
| more in line with typical figures. 1:
| https://www.energy.gov.au/sites/default/files/hvac-
| factsheet-chiller-efficiency.pdf 2: https://www.mis
| sioncriticalmagazine.com/ext/resources/MC/Home/Files/PDFs
| /(TUI3011B)SimpleModelDetermingTrueTCO.pdf
| Symbiote wrote:
| The average consumer cost for 1kWh of electricity in the
| EU is 20C/. A well-used server might consume 500W on
| average. units '500W * 1 year * 0.20
| EUR/kWh' 'EUR' EUR 876
|
| I'm sure businesses get a discount, but we haven't paid
| for cooling yet. This is hardly a rounding error.
| anthk wrote:
| Which units is that? Mine does return stuff in Euros but
| with a fraction.
| Symbiote wrote:
| GNU Units version 2.19 with readline, with utf8,
| locale en_IE
|
| and no customizations. units '500W * 1
| year * 0.20/kWh' '1'
|
| would also work.
| anthk wrote:
| Do you have a custom ~/.units file?
| user@xirl>units '500W * 1 year * 0.20/kWh' '1'
| * 876.58128 / 0.0011407955
| ksec wrote:
| >I'm sure businesses get a discount
|
| Not as large as some may expect once you factor in power
| delivery guarantee and redundancy. But basically yes.
| Every single HyperScaler has been pointing out
| electricity as one of their largest item on their TCO,
| 2nd only to hardware cost.
| iorrus wrote:
| In Ireland the national grid is under strain due to
| electricity usage from data centres, so much so that
| there is discussion to deny permission for new ones. I
| very much doubt that the electricity costs are
| negligible, it's also one of the reason data centres are
| in Ireland as due to the relatively mild climate it
| reduces hearing/cooling costs.
|
| https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/data-centres-
| could-...
| Symbiote wrote:
| Isn't more of the reason political (taxes etc)?
|
| The same climate benefits apply to northern England and
| Scotland, but Great Britain's grid's capacity has around
| 10 times the capacity.
|
| (Ireland's grid's peak demand was 6.8GW, Great Britain's
| 63GW.)
|
| Although the same argument then applies for siting the
| datacentres in continental Europe, where the grid is
| around 667GW. Perhaps this is part of Facebook's
| reasoning for a second datacentre in Denmark.
|
| (Most of Denmark, including Facebook's existing
| datacentre, is connected to the continental European
| grid. The eastern islands are part of the Scandinavian
| grid.)
|
| [1] https://www.thelocal.dk/20211013/facebook-eyes-
| second-danish...
| easygenes wrote:
| Will be interesting to see where datacenters wind up in
| Europe this next decade. My money is on Norway.
|
| Norway seems poised to build out significantly. They're
| actively inviting datacenters [1]. They also seem to have
| lower electric costs for large businesses [2] vs Ireland
| [3]. FAANG are already populating the Nordics too [4].
| 1: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/norway-
| wants-data-centers-to-locate-there-and-be-more-
| sustainable-too/ 2:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/595859/electricity-
| industry-price-norway/ 3:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/595806/electricity-
| industry-price-ireland/ 4:
| https://www.zdnet.com/pictures/the-nordic-datacenter-
| boom/
| hencoappel wrote:
| As far as I'm aware, efficiency is key for datacenters.
| It can lower direct electricity costs, but also the cost
| of cooling. I've always been under the impression that
| the cost of running is much more than the cost of the
| hardware which is why they are willing to pay so much for
| the best/most efficient hardware?
| oefrha wrote:
| Are you speaking from experience doing data center asset
| management or are you just speculating? I don't know
| about data centers, but for colocation, electricity cost
| is far from a rounding error. Also, cooling is a major
| factor that is directly related to power consumption, as
| pointed out by siblings.
| easygenes wrote:
| See [1], figure 1 there is a fairly typical data center
| costs breakdown at the highest level for TCO. Total
| energy is by far the lowest, at around 10-15%. Site
| infrastructure, IT infrastructure, and staff are the real
| cost priorities.
|
| There's a caveat to that in the planning phase of a data
| center: A lot of the site infrastructure costs are a
| function of the total power requirement. So if - when
| building out a data center - you can get more power
| efficiency, then that does translate to a significant
| cost savings.
|
| Cooling tends to be somewhere between a 20 and 60% add on
| to the direct power consumption of a server.
| 1: https://www.missioncriticalmagazine.com/ext/resources/
| MC/Home/Files/PDFs/(TUI3011B)SimpleModelDetermingTrueTCO.
| pdf
| fullstop wrote:
| > Once they adopt a technology, people "know" it works and
| it's safe to switch.
|
| Not always. Firewire, for example.
| qwertox wrote:
| It basically says that the "intel inside"-logo on laptops
| has become meaningless.
| tdrdt wrote:
| You are giving too much praise to Apple. They never set
| trends in the datacenter world.
|
| Arm servers have been sold for some years now. AWS, Oracle
| and others already made the switch. And the fastest super
| computer (Fugaku, Japan) uses ARM.
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| I'm building server software for my startup. My
| development environment is a linux docker container
| running on a linux vm running on an x86 mac. Its running
| the same binary as the docker container running in
| kubernetes on an x86 aws server.
|
| The fact that apple is making arm mainstream means if I
| switch to arm, so are a lot of others working to make the
| arm port of my stack a first class consideration.
|
| Suddenly the gavatron cores aws has are becoming a whole
| lot more viable. I personally plan to move our api
| instances over to them once the erlang vm's arm port
| matures a bit.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| In CPU choices, when Apple have lead (PowerPC) nobody
| followed. Their other CPU choices have hardly been brave.
| 6502? Not the first. 680x0? Followers. Intel they were way
| behind and all their laptop and desktop gear was a
| generation behind everything other companies were using.
|
| Phones bit of a mixed bag but their computing gear has
| always been a bit old hat since the 1980s.
|
| The M1 is the first time since PowerPC they took a risk. My
| guess is that it will turn out the same PowerPC. I really
| want a linux powered ARM workstation but Apple aren't going
| to make that.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > In CPU choices, when Apple have lead (PowerPC) nobody
| followed.
|
| PowerPC was developed by IBM. Apple got involved when
| Motorola could not deliver a faster 68k to beat Intel's
| 486 which was passing 50MHz. So they joined IBM along
| with Motorola and formed the AIM alliance (Apple, IBM,
| Motorola) to build better processors.
|
| > The M1 is the first time since PowerPC they took a
| risk.
|
| There's little to no risc (buh-dum-tish) in moving to Arm
| these days. It's a well supported and understood
| architecture and found everywhere.
|
| > I really want a linux powered ARM workstation but Apple
| aren't going to make that.
|
| Apple has the power to steer its own ecosystem. When AMD
| was working on its Arm A series server processors I kept
| thinking "This sounds like a backwards approach destined
| to fail. Why not start by making a performant Arm SoC
| with 2-4 cores and GPU with a TDP of 10-20W? Target it at
| consoles/tv/laptops/desktop computing and jump start the
| desktop Arm market which will naturally lead to demand
| for Arm servers." The Idea was an Arm SoC that could fill
| the gap between low power/performance Arm SoC's for
| mobile/embedded and the power hungry yet performant x86
| chips. Basically an AMD version of the M1. That could
| have really changed things but the big issue AMD would
| face is where's the Arm Desktop software ecosystem?
| That's why Apple can take these "risks", they have full
| control over the whole stack.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| They need to steer it so it can address more than 32Gb of
| memory. On any particular day I can chew that up with a
| couple of fat VMs running legacy stuff that customers
| still need supported but I don't want a physical machine
| hanging around to work on.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagePad
| anthk wrote:
| Irrelevant, Palm did it better.
|
| No one got a Newton, but every mid-boss or manager got a
| Palm.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| But Palm didn't drive the CPU direction of the industry
| as GP claimed.
| anthk wrote:
| Neither did the Newton.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Did you forget about Amazon and Google Arm servers? It's not
| just Apple, everyone is moving away from x86.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| AWS launched their own ARM based processor, Graviton a
| while ago.
|
| Now they have begun nudging them to serverless fleet by
| making them available at a lower price point.
|
| Not too different from their parent, Amazon, pushing their
| own branded products, cutting out the middleman.
| klelatti wrote:
| > The ground Intel has lost in desktop and mobile is more
| than made up for by their utter dominance in server. Intel
| also has a lot of plays that should bear fruit in holding or
| retaking ground on consumer compute in the next few years.
|
| The basic problem is that Intel hasn't lost ground in mobile,
| it's not even on the playing field, a huge strategic blunder.
| That leaves it defending its dominant positions on server and
| desktop / laptop. At the same time billions of $ pour into
| TSMC from mobile and those same facilities are now being used
| to make desktop and server CPUs that compete with Intel.
|
| Its execution has been poor too but this massive strategic
| issue is a bigger problem.
| PeterisP wrote:
| IMHO server marketshare is much more fickle than the consumer
| one.
|
| For consumers, compatibility is a big issue and hard to
| switch unless a myriad of things work properly.
|
| For servers, if just a single commonly used system (e.g.
| mariadb or wordpress) works and you can do it 10% cheaper,
| companies can replace large quantities of hardware to a
| completely different architecture.
| eecc wrote:
| Yeah, but big companies have long lifecycle and bundling
| contracts that makes them more resistant to change.
| loeg wrote:
| Server marketshare has been fairly sticky -- despite AMD
| offering low-risk, same ISA migration, and attractive
| pricing, the server market was relatively slow to adopt
| Zen.
| foota wrote:
| I think this is largely just lag between orders for new
| xen parts and the capacity coming online. I would expect
| to see a lot of xen processors in fleets being built
| today.
| loeg wrote:
| > I think this is largely just lag between orders for new
| xen parts and the capacity coming online.
|
| That may be a piece of it, but I think there's a little
| more. AMD released the first generation of Epyc
| processors in June 2017. They didn't see much adoption
| for years.[1]
|
| [1]: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/vono9miWH83ZVeqRfE
| 9CCV-970...
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| My take at this is because of inertia. I have a large
| fleet of servers that have been Intel since forever. I
| see no reason to migrate them today as things work
| reasonably well. We upgrade the hardware every 4-5 years.
| So during the next upgrade for sure I'll choose AMD,
| there is no question of that. ARM will be a serious
| competitor and RISC-V, too, that's for sure - but they
| are just not there yet when we talk about maximum
| performance (in our case, energy consumption is not the
| main concern)
| ksec wrote:
| >the server market was relatively slow to adopt Zen.
|
| Is this finally an accepted truth now? I have been
| banging on about it for years that AMD are not doing good
| enough on Server. They will still gain a little more
| market share with Zen 4, but now Intel is coming back.
| The perfect opportunity windows is closing down.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| OTOH, new HPC systems have been quick to adopt Zen in the
| form of dual-socket EPYC nodes.
|
| Actually if you look at the current top 10
| supercomputers, only 2 are Intel. The rest are custom ARM
| or RISC CPUs (in Japan and China), IBM Power9, or AMD
| EPYC.
| freemint wrote:
| HPC is a special industry in that regard. HPC is know to
| take well managed technical risks such as building custom
| CPUs (A64FX in Fugaku) or using less popular
| architectures (SPARC, Power). If one can be certain that
| with enough coding hours codes can be adapted to run on
| those platforms and they will end up faster more exotic
| hardware will be bought or considered. Nation level HPC
| projects are not conservative, Industrial HPC maybe a bit
| more so.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > 1) Arc GPUs
|
| I've been hearing the same story for 10+ yrs on how Intel is
| going to disrupt the GPU market any day now. For real.
|
| Remember Larrabee?
|
| It's not going to happen. Intel is not good at disruption.
| They're good at several things. But not disruption.
| h2odragon wrote:
| "This time fer sure, Rocky!"
|
| Seriously. "More cache on die?" reminds me of the scene in
| "Smokin' Aces" ... "we did that. all of it."
|
| Intel is ossified so totally that the top i dunno how many
| layers will have to be brutaly cleaved off it before the
| remaining pieces can hope to be productive again.
| dustintrex wrote:
| ARM and AMD are both making steady gains in the server space
| as well though. AMD is already offered by all the
| hyperscalers, and AWS recently introduced ARM as well.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > The only magic in the wins AMD and Apple have had the last
| few years have been in them being effectively a manufacturing
| process node ahead of Intel.
|
| Except for all the features on the chips, differing design
| philosophies, and peripheral interconnects, sure the _only_
| difference is manufacturing node. But what have the Romans
| ever done for us?
| rjzzleep wrote:
| From what I'm seeing, I think assuming that RISC-V CPUs being
| blob free and open, just because the ISA is open is illusory
| at best and wilfully lying at worst.
| Iolaum wrote:
| It still removes a serious obstacle to getting a blob free
| cpu where user can have control over what it does. The ISA
| is no more a "magic sauce" to be protected and patented and
| therefore hidden behind closed source.
| easygenes wrote:
| Well, if they wind up with blobs I think they will at least
| be more limited. The "Management Engine" style ones are the
| most egregious. Ones for the sake of hardware video
| encode/decode are a bit more forgivable, though still
| regrettable.
|
| And there is certainly growing interest in blob-free
| computing [1], so some at least will exist to fill that
| demand. There is some hope for video with Linux landing
| blob-free hardware encode/decode very quickly the last
| couple of years [2]. 1:
| https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform/updates/post-
| campaign-orders 2:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9JLxjYlIWg
| CameronNemo wrote:
| I agree that open ISA does not equate to blob free
| hardware. And many RISC-V designs out there will have
| royalties, and devices blobs.
|
| But the open ISA levels the playing field and allows for
| upstart hardware designers to make compatible hardware that
| is royalty and/or blob free.
| [deleted]
| brucehoult wrote:
| When you have the complete verilog source code for the CPU
| core it's pretty hard to hide anything.
|
| Following the source code for the C910 core upload 24 hours
| ago, Olof Kindgren is live-tweeting getting it going in an
| FPGA using the existing FuseSoC framework. He made
| significant progress in the first session before going to
| bed. It would not surprise me if it's working in the next
| 24 hours.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| > When you have the complete verilog source code for the
| CPU core
|
| That's a big "when". The road from an ISA to a core is
| long, and unless the core is copylefted (this isn't),
| then you aren't going to get the source code for
| something someone else manufactured either.
| bildung wrote:
| Copyleft won't help you there either if the license
| issuer is also the producer of the physical chip:
| Licenses are regulating what _third parties_ can do with
| the source, they don 't restrict the issuer.
| keonix wrote:
| They do actually restrict issuer in most cases. Linus
| can't just strip Linux of other developers parts because
| they are tightly interconnected. He could relicense 30
| year old version of Linux, but it would be useless
| bildung wrote:
| I just have been more precise and say _copyright holder_
| instead of _issuer_. Linus doesn 't hold the copyright
| for most of the Linux source, hence he can't relicense
| without explicit oks from the other developers.
| jmnicolas wrote:
| But how can I be sure the chip I have in my hand is built
| upon this code and that no blob has been added?
| gnramires wrote:
| By (1) purchasing anonymously from retail sources, and
|
| (2) having researchers with anonymous retail samples
| verify through decapping and inspection. I believe
| der8auer in Germany does die shots -- it would not be a
| bad idea to kick start this kind of research for
| community assurance purposes.
|
| It's difficult to prove there's no hidden logic, but it's
| also not trivial to hide complex logic needed to
| introduce covert undetectable vulnerabilities (probably
| around things the RNG source or crypto).
|
| Also assuming you're a high value target, otherwise this
| is mostly going too far.
| ivalm wrote:
| I think alderlake is very promising. Big-small designed cpus,
| even on x86, seem like the way to go.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| The way to go for what?
| baq wrote:
| for Intel to not go out of business...?
| berkut wrote:
| low power usage mobile stuff which still packs some
| processing power.
| ivalm wrote:
| Mobile/laptops eg the sector where apple/ms are switching.
| Big-small is the way to get high power efficiency.
| chorsestudios wrote:
| Given the current semiconductor shortages I don't think Intel
| will have any trouble selling chips within the next couple
| years.
| shrewduser wrote:
| Sure... but what happens on the other side of these unusual
| market conditions?
| LegitShady wrote:
| amd survived for a long time with worse chips and someone
| else's fab. Intel has their own fabs and the runway needed
| to get back in the game.
| metagame wrote:
| They've tried a lot of "reimagining." It never works. No one
| wants Intel on mobile, despite Intel's mobile chips being
| absolutely great when they were actually releasing them, and no
| one wants a genuinely high-performance chip if it means they
| have to make alterations to how their software is written.
|
| I have a lot of criticisms of Intel, but held back from
| reimagining isn't quite a great one.
| FreezingKeeper wrote:
| And to think they had it in their hands in 1997 with
| StrongARM
| genmud wrote:
| When has intel reimagined products that have low power and
| low price? Intel has been notorious for having power hungry
| and overpriced stuff.
| wmf wrote:
| Didn't Pouslbo and friends have negative prices ("contra-
| revenue") yet still nobody wanted them?
| nuerow wrote:
| For those who, like me, never heard of Poulsbo, it's a
| chipset for Intel's first generation of Atom processors.
|
| https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/chipsets/poulsbo
| baybal2 wrote:
| Poulsbo was disastrously bad, quirky, and impractical.
|
| It took all x86 platform warts, and replaced it with even
| harder to get right "Poulsbo warts" like SFI, and etc.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Their low power stuff was garbage. And itanium went
| unsupported and was half baked.
|
| Intel knew where their money makers were, x86 servers. Their
| attention and investment showed a lack of foresight, combined
| with their famous bloated engineering teams, is a story as
| old as time itself.
| fulafel wrote:
| Intel had the best high performance ARM processors for a long
| time (StrongARM, acquired from DEC).
|
| Timing is hard.
| a-dub wrote:
| how much of arm's renaissance comes from the iphone and
| qualcomm's socs?
|
| i don't recall hearing about arm in other places really...
| maybe the occasional home router or cable set top box...
| regularfry wrote:
| Low-end ARM chips are everywhere as generic
| microcontrollers in things you probably only barely think
| about as having electronic components at all. The next
| vacuum cleaner I buy will probably have an ARM in it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| But that's mostly phenomenon of this new smartphone era.
| That market used to be completely dominated by 8bit or
| 16bit Atmels and PICs (an probably still is, but ARM is
| gaining market share fast).
| regularfry wrote:
| It's not just smartphone knock-on, although that does
| help. The chips in question aren't smartphone class. When
| I've spoken to people about it, it's more a matter of
| toolchain, price, and compute power: the tools are
| familiar (it's just GCC, not something manufacturer-
| specific), at interesting volumes they're within spitting
| distance of the others for price, and if it turns out you
| need more CPU than you originally thought there's usually
| miles of headroom. The idea of "just go straight to ARM
| from the start, it's not worth bothering with
| microcontrollers" is the mantra they go by.
|
| There are still a load of jobs you wouldn't do that for,
| but the list is short and getting shorter.
| fulafel wrote:
| Yep, the inertia and economy of scale come from there and
| when the pendulum is in full swing, servers have seemed
| inevitable.
|
| But timing is hard here too, and lots of things that seem
| inevitable take many attempts and a long to happen. ARM
| server chips have near history marked by struggle, there
| have been several over the last decade. Remember eg AMD in
| 2012? https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2012/10/amd-a... Or this ARM Ltd announcement:
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Server-CPU-Xeon-Opteron-
| AR...
| robomartin wrote:
| Did anyone instantly go back to the memory of the Jack Ma & Elon
| Musk conference panel WTF? moment and think: No way Jack is
| running this company, at all.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| tbh, a lot of Chinese people sound off speaking English when
| they're not native speakers. I don't think he's actually stupid
| but a consequence of the big differences in languages.
| kabes wrote:
| You have a link with context?
| ausudhz wrote:
| https://youtu.be/f3lUEnMaiAU
| ausudhz wrote:
| Well, to be fair both were bs-ing around. The difference is
| that Musk is native English speaker and you had the impression
| that he knew what the hell he was saying.
|
| It pretty clear to anyone that is not a fanboy that both (like
| is normal in these situations as they're CEOs) have no idea
| what they're saying.
| ausudhz wrote:
| Jack Ma is no longer the CEO of Alibaba since quite a while now
| jpgvm wrote:
| Here are the RISV-V cores: https://github.com/T-head-Semi
| tim-- wrote:
| One of their repos has a bunch of patches/scripts to be able to
| run Android on the CPUs[1]. (XuanTie C910)
|
| The linked video (https://occ-oss-prod.oss-cn-
| hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/share/risc...) is impressive! Open source
| Android running on an Open Source CPU.
|
| [1] https://github.com/T-head-Semi/riscv-aosp
| eunos wrote:
| What does it mean by open sourcing chips? Does that mean I can
| bring the source to fabs and fabricate them out?
| adrian_b wrote:
| The Verilog code for the 4 RISC-V cores of various sizes is
| licensed with the Apache License.
|
| They are some of the best existing RISC-V cores. One of them
| was the fastest existing RISC-V core when it was introduced.
|
| You can use the Verilog code to either synthesize it for a FPGA
| and run it in a FPGA board with a large enough FPGA, or if you
| have access to an ASIC manufacturing process, you can
| synthesize it for that process and include the RISC-V cores
| together with whatever else is needed in a custom IC, without
| paying any royalties.
|
| Using one of these cores for a FPGA board seems very
| attractive, because most other open-source cores that are
| available have a much lower performance.
|
| They have also provided versions of the gcc compiler, of the
| glibc standard C library, of the boot loader, of the Android
| Bionic standard library and a few other software packages that
| are needed to run programs for Linux or Android on these RISC-V
| cores, which have many extensions over the base RISC-V
| specification.
|
| Alibaba appears to have played for a few years with RISC-V, but
| even if they have succeeded to design the fastest such cores,
| eventually they have decided to use ARMv9-A for their real
| high-performance server CPUs.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I don't think so. You still need at least "millions of dollars"
| and some experienced dev staff (most likely snatched from the
| big guys) if you plan on making anything competitive with
| intel, arm, or apple.
| brucehoult wrote:
| It's not a chip, it's a CPU core. You still need to add a lot
| of things to make a chip: interface for DRAM, something like
| PCIe for input and output. And you have to do layout, timing
| calculations, and all that kind of thing.
|
| But yes, if you have sufficient funding and expertise you can
| take their CPU core -- approximately as good as the performance
| cores in the Samsung Galaxy S8 or the Raspberry Pi 4 -- and
| without permission or payment or even notification use them in
| your own chips.
| farseer wrote:
| That means they are giving up on risc-v? The future is arm for
| them it seems.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| I wonder if they will sell the Yitian 710 directly since I'm not
| sure how large on foreign use of their cloud (? Guess I was out
| of the loop on cloud providers in China). I would love to have a
| machine that could compile monstrosities like Chromium and
| Firefox in < 10 minutes.
|
| Since all these high core count, cheap ARM processors are only
| available via cloud providers I might end up using spot instances
| to spin up very large build servers but it feels overkill for
| what are currently just personal projects (NixOS stuff).
| [deleted]
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Does anyone have any data on benchmarks for the Risc-V cores? I
| wasn't able to find any. I'm specifically interested in the C906
| (aka Allwinner D1 which exists as a dev board[0] for ~$120 ) and
| the C910 which is apparently multicore. I'd love to know how they
| compare to SiFive's offerings and similar class arm chips.
|
| [0]: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002856721588.html
| brucehoult wrote:
| The Hot Chips presentation a year ago when the C910 was
| announced shows it comparable to ARM A73.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/15991/hot-chips-2020-live-blo...
|
| I should have one of the eval boards in mid November and I'll
| be able to do real-word tests then.
|
| The C906 is a little bit faster than a Raspberry Pi Zero,
| except it has a fairly useful vector unit which can double or
| triple the speed of many things.
|
| I published memcpy and strcpy benchmarks on Nezha six months
| ago:
|
| https://hoult.org/d1_memcpy.txt https://hoult.org/d1_strcpy.txt
|
| I also have results for it in my primes benchmark. It beats out
| a U54 at the same clock speed and is not far off the higher
| clocked A53 in a Pi 3.
|
| https://hoult.org/primes.txt
|
| The current "Nezha" board at $99 is obviously expensive
| compared to a Pi Zero. SiPeed are promising a board with with
| same D1 SoC with 512 MB RAM for under $20 within the next
| month.
|
| https://twitter.com/SipeedIO/status/1443486484112183298
|
| The C906 is very comparable to SiFive U54 (as in the HiFive
| Unleashed, and the Microsemi "Icicle" FPGA) except it has a
| vector unit and a much better DRAM interface than the FU540
| had. But the D1 is only single core.
|
| The C910 is comparable to the SiFive U84, which has not yet
| been seen in public in actual silicon.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| awesome, thanks for the info. I just purchased one of the
| Nezha D1 boards assuming it would have relatively poor
| performance. Still hopefully interesting to play around with.
| bullen wrote:
| Where are the Gflops/W?
| d33 wrote:
| As a person learning Chinese, I find it super frustrating that
| Chinese brand names are only mentioned in Pinyin, and to make it
| worse, without tones. With tones, it would have been xuantie,
| which makes it possible to properly pronounce without extra
| context. In Chinese characters it's Xuan Tie in simplified and
| Xuan Tie in traditional script. The meaning is "reddish-black
| iron". I'm curious if it should be taken literally or if it's a
| cultural reference of some sort.
| paradite wrote:
| These names usually come from Chinese mythology and Wuxia,
| which carries a sense of national/cultural pride:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_mythology
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuxia
|
| Xuantie probably came from Xuxia, and is widely used in pop
| culture (games especially) for metals that have special
| mystical properties.
| knolax wrote:
| By your logic a World of Warcraft reference is also
| nationalistic. Western engineers can make the most convoluted
| cultural references possible with no criticism but something
| as innocuous as naming a processor after a fictional metal
| attracts accusationa of nationalism.
| liuw wrote:
| Wu Xia (Wuxia) culture is big in Alibaba. Everyone has a Hua
| Ming (alias / nickname) in the company. In the early days,
| people just picked names from Jin Yong (Jin Yong)'s novels.
| Jack Ma's Hua Ming is Feng Qing Yang , who is a great sword
| master in one of the novels. Source: I had a short stint
| there.
|
| Picking Xuan Tie , which also comes from Jin Yong's novel,
| seems rather natural in that context.
|
| Jin Yong's novels are very popular in Chinese speaking
| countries and regions. Most readers won't associate them with
| China. I don't think it has anything to do with national
| pride. Culture pride? I don't see much either.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Maybe a reference from a novel [1]. Rough Google translation of
| the summary: " _The black iron is the material recorded in Jin
| Yong 's novels. It is dark in color with a faint red light. It
| is extremely heavy, has a high melting point, and has a
| magnetic force._"
|
| [1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%8E%84%E9%93%81/2949942
| tfcata wrote:
| It's the name of a sword in Jin Yong's novels.
| leeoniya wrote:
| > In-House Armv9?
|
| https://semianalysis.com/the-semiconductor-heist-of-the-cent...
|
| (discussed recently:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28329731)
| ksec wrote:
| >> In-House Armv9?
|
| They meant in house ARMv9 design as in Amazon in house Graviton
| 2. In reality it is an ARM N2 design. Although likely clocked
| slightly lower due to TDP usage.
|
| I dont think the ARM China issues has been solved ( And
| possibly never will be ). So the ARMv9 design is likely coming
| from ARM UK. Alibaba also operate in SEA and expanding outside
| of China.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Because ARMv9-A is very new, publicly announced only this year,
| it does not seem likely that Alibaba could have licensed it
| from the rogue former ARM subsidiary, but more likely from the
| parent company.
|
| IIRC, the problems with ARM China started long before the
| launch of ARMv9-A. Alibaba has certainly received technical
| information some time before the public announcement, but it is
| unlikely that any IP would have been transferred to ARM China
| before that.
| redundantly wrote:
| Every time I see a headline with RISC-V in it I get excited, but
| then immediately disappointed that it still isn't a widely
| accessible product.
| brucehoult wrote:
| It's getting there.
|
| There are getting to be a good number of SoCs reaching actual
| silicon in small batches, and available on relatively expensive
| boards ($100 to $665). They work. You can buy them.
|
| Hopefully some of them go into mass production, which should
| drop the production cost for the actual chips to $5 or so and
| boards to something like Pi prices (there are dozens of
| companies that can make boards once chips are available).
|
| Having the core and chip designed and progressed to working
| test silicon is by far the hardest part already done.
|
| Price then comes down to production volume.
| sitkack wrote:
| I think the lack of excitement is misplaced! RISC-V is
| already amazingly successful, and I would argue it is
| _already_ the most widely available technology.
|
| Tens of high quality OSS HDL implementations that target
| FPGAs and ASICs. Many tens of successful hardware
| implementations, already shipping multiple billions of cores.
|
| The board Bruce mentions is an amazing value. A board in that
| form factor that you can bring up a graphical Linux and the
| distros are _already_ targeting it.
|
| You can get a 4-Stage 160Mhz RV32IMC with 400K of SRAM for $1
| in the form of an ESP32-C3. Dev board for $15.
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