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Chinese Chipmaker Unveils 64-Core ARM Processor
- geezerjay 10y agoSounds cool. Does anyone have any benchmarks to get an idea of what this processor can actually do? A price would also be nice.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- petra 10y ago512Gflops. But probably it isn't supposed to lead(which requires 14nm), but to use manufacturing fabs fully controlled by china.
- geezerjay 10y agoThe 512Gflops is only an uncorroborated blurb posted in a press release. Thus, its highly doubtful that the chip's real world performance comes anywhere near that value. It would be very interesting to see real-world benchmarks compiled independently.
- rbanffy 10y agoI have grown suspicious of powers of 2. 512 anything sounds like a theoretical limit based on the number of cores.
- AstroJetson 10y ago"FCBGA package with 2892 pins" Yikes! Thats pretty dense on the other side, would love to see a picture. It's a 100 watts, so at 3.3 volts its drawing 30+ amps, so I'm guessing that a good chunk of those pins are power and ground. Is that a good theory?
- xiaopanga 10y agoModern cores are more like 1V or lower. so more like 100A
- revelation 10y agoThat's crazy. Do modern cores not also use local, integrated power regulation? I think I remember an Intel PR release about that, but I don't know the detail.
- pstrateman 10y ago> Process：Manufacturing with 28nm process standard Vcc for 28nm is 850-1050mV (varies based on the exact process) so yeah more like 100A and probably that's all going through the pins without on die power regulation
- xiaopanga 10y agoThe inductors are still too big to be on-chip
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hatsunearu 10y agoIntel toyed around with fully integrated inductors even in production but I think they kicked them off chip for thermal reasons.
- mattthebaker 10y agoIntel only recently introduced this feature, and it surely required a lot of R&D. At the time they were most likely the only one, and may still be.
- xorblurb 10y agoThen they removed it in their most recent chips...
- nxjfxgkkt 10y agoAt 500 gigaflops, I would buy these in a heartbeat if they were offered for sale to the public. While that's only half the performance of a xeon phi, this is a traditional CPU which makes programming it much more straightforward. Not to mention that the cost would be significantly less.
- imtringued 10y agoNowadays Xeon Phis are traditional CPUs.
- milcron 10y agoThis is true! New with the Knights Landing generation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi#Knights_Landing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi#Knights_Landing available in two forms, as a coprocessor or a host processor
- mrb 10y ago512 single precision GFLOPS is not half, but 1/10th the performance of a Xeon Phi (Xeon Phi 7210 is 5325 single precision GFLOPS). However perhaps this processor beats the Xeon Phi 7210 in perf/price as the latter is horrendously priced at $2438 (list price) as well as perf/watt.
- snaky 10y agoDo you think this 64-core beast would be priced at less than $243?
- mrb 10y agoProbably not, but maybe. This chinese processor is hardly a beast. It is comparable (±20%) in raw GFLOPS to a ~$200 Intel skylake processor: 4-core 3.3GHz i7-6700K is rated 422 single precision GFLOPS.
- petra 10y agoDie size is 640mm2, die cost is ~$42(asumming TSMC's yields, chinese fabs have much lower yields) - so at volume manufacturing cost(including test and package) is surely less than $100 ,closer to $60-70. And in large enough volume, assuming 50% gross margins, sure it could be cheaper.
- z2 10y agoIt seems this was announced exactly one year ago, not today! Edit: Though last year's announcement was just the planned specs, perhaps the unveiling here is the prototype itself and not the concept. [Chinese links] http://www.ltaaa.com/bbs/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=364899 http://www.ltaaa.com/bbs/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=364899 http://bbs.kafan.cn/thread-1849400-1-1.html http://bbs.kafan.cn/thread-1849400-1-1.html
- jcbeard 10y agoNice slide presentation here: http://insidehpc.com/2016/08/phytium-china-unveils-64-core-arm-hpc-processor/ http://insidehpc.com/2016/08/phytium-china-unveils-64-core-a...
- cordite 10y agoI wonder how erlang would work on this, especially in a multi-coprocessor system.
- weatherlight 10y agoI was just thinking the same thing! I really hope as more cores are available on the same machine we start to see languages like Erlang/Elixir really take off.
- mafribe 10y agoA crucial question for fast execution of the BEAM-machine on multiple cores is how expensive message copying between cores is. With that many cores, there's probably no shared memory between all cores. How do the remaining cores communicate? Can the BEAM machine's optimisations take into account communication cost?
- yellowapple 10y agoI don't know very much about BEAM's internals, but one of the key reasons why Erlang (and therefore Elixir) is able to spin up so many processes is because the processes don't have shared state, or at least they don't have writable shared state; the underlying data structures are all immutable, and this is enforced on a VM level (which is why Elixir's "mutability" is only in terms of which data a given variable holds rather than the data itself). Given that, my guess would be that Erlang/Elixir/LFE/$INSERT_OTHER_BEAM_BASED_LANGUAGE_HERE would do pretty darn well with a high number of cores. I hope one of these days I'll be able to afford such a machine (whether with this particular ARM processor or something else with a ridiculous number of cores/threads, like a modern POWER or SPARC CPU) or have access to one so that I can experience for myself exactly how darn well :) It's also worth noting that Erlang has had a lot of design around clusters of independent nodes, which means even more extreme problems when it comes to data copying between nodes. I reckon intercore message copying is significantly more performant than internode message copying.
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- gourou 10y agoI guess that's what happens when you forbid Intel from selling to China http://wccftech.com/us-government-bans-intel-nvidia-amd-chips-china/ http://wccftech.com/us-government-bans-intel-nvidia-amd-chip...
- gscott 10y agoChina has loads of money to throw around... they get what they want. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/227059-amd-announces-new-293-million-joint-venture-to-build-servers-for-the-chinese-market http://www.extremetech.com/computing/227059-amd-announces-ne...
- nl 10y agoThat subsequently prompted some speculation that the chip would replace the now-banned Xeon Phi processors in the 100-petaflop upgrade to the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which was supposed to be revealed in June at ISC 2016. Given that the latter never happened, it’s likely those FT-2000/64 chips were not deployed, or if they were, did not meet expectations. Hmm.. Process：Manufacturing with 28nm process And there you go. Not sure if people are aware, but China doesn't have any sub-28nm (or 22nm?) fabs. TSMC has some of course, but the Taiwanese government is very, very strong on keeping those plants in Taiwan (although they are fine with TSMC etc building less advanced fabs in China). Until they get a process shrink on this, I think.. well, I'd like to see some independent benchmarks. Edit: The Samsung Exynos 5433 (4 cores on a 20nm process[1]) maxes out at 3.78 GFLOPS[2] on selected benchmarks. Call it 1 GLOP/core - I find it unlikely that this thing is going to get 500 GFLOPS with 64 cores, even with a higher power consumption. [1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/8718/the-samsung-galaxy-note-4-exynos-review http://www.anandtech.com/show/8718/the-samsung-galaxy-note-4... [2] http://www.anandtech.com/show/8718/the-samsung-galaxy-note-4-exynos-review/4 http://www.anandtech.com/show/8718/the-samsung-galaxy-note-4...
- tcoppi 10y ago> Not sure if people are aware, but China doesn't have any sub-28nm (or 22nm?) fabs. That isn't true, SMIC has a 28nm process(very low yields, and only fabbing designs from Qualcomm afaik, but supposedly does exist, as far as anyone from the west can reasonably ascertain). [1] 1. http://www.smics.com/eng/press/press_releases_details.php?id=364048 http://www.smics.com/eng/press/press_releases_details.php?id...
- wodenokoto 10y ago>> Not sure if people are aware, but China doesn't have any sub-28nm (or 22nm?) fabs. >That isn't true, SMIC has a 28nm process I don't understand your comment. 28 is not sub-28.
- tcoppi 10y agoWhoops, my confusion came from the fact that the article was talking about it being made on a 28nm process, and I thought the criticism was China would be unable to fab it.
- api 10y agoI fear for Intel, AMD, and the US semiconductor industry. This is not competitive with Xeons yet, but it will be. On the other hand this is good for the future of computing in general. The worst case scenario would be for things to stagnate with no competition, offering no incentive for anyone to push beyond traditional Moore's law type scaling.
- yazr 10y agoThis appears to a global-cache-coherence chip. Slides 12-16 http://insidehpc.com/2016/08/phytium-china-unveils-64-core-arm-hpc-processor/ http://insidehpc.com/2016/08/phytium-china-unveils-64-core-a... Each 8-core "panel" has its own L2 and DCU The L3 is globally shared, with the usual cache coherence protocol. 30ns latency for L3 hit. I am not an expert on cache performance, but this certainly seems like an up-to-date design. Can anyone compare this to Xeon and Phi ?!