16 ms·
Alibaba Open Source XuanTie RISC-V Cores, Introduces In-House Armv9 Server Chip
- tryptophan 5y ago>>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 5y agoHere are the RISV-V cores: https://github.com/T-head-Semi https://github.com/T-head-Semi
- tim-- 5y agoOne 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/riscv_android_demo.mp4 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 https://github.com/T-head-Semi/riscv-aosp
- redundantly 5y agoEvery 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 5y agoIt'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 5y agoI 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.
- KingMachiavelli 5y agoI 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).
- killingtime74 5y agoI don’t think any cloud provider will be selling these custom chips, it’s not their business model. You can buy ARM servers already (Ampere Altra https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/16315/the-ampere-altra-review)
- DeathArrow 5y agoIs C910 out in the wild? Are there any dev boards with it?
- brucehoult 5y agohttps://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003395978459.html 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.
- heian0224 5y agoA new 'Weex',like Alibaba before, boast to the sky.
- sydthrowaway 5y agoGamechanger
- maxpert 5y agoIntel 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.
- adminscoffee 5y agodidn't intel have a huge hack where their secret processor data was leaked out? i wouldn't be surprised if all these new chips got inspired by that
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago> 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 5y agoClassic innovator's dilemma. They're retreating up-market.
- urda 5y agoThe 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.
- codezero 5y agoIntel is counting on being nationalized.
- kwere 5y agopretty realistic unfortunately
- MobiusHorizons 5y agoDoes 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 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005002856721588.html
- brucehoult 5y agoThe 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-blog-alibaba-xuantie910-riscv-cpu-300pm-pt 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_memcpy.txt https://hoult.org/d1_strcpy.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 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 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 5y agoawesome, 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.
- robomartin 5y agoDid 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 5y agotbh, 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 5y agoYou have a link with context?
- ausudhz 5y agohttps://youtu.be/f3lUEnMaiAU https://youtu.be/f3lUEnMaiAU
- ausudhz 5y agoWell, 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 5y agoJack Ma is no longer the CEO of Alibaba since quite a while now
- leeoniya 5y ago> In-House Armv9? https://semianalysis.com/the-semiconductor-heist-of-the-century-arm-china-has-gone-completely-rogue-operating-as-an-independent-company-with-their-own-ip/ https://semianalysis.com/the-semiconductor-heist-of-the-cent... (discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28329731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28329731)
- adrian_b 5y agoBecause 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.
- ksec 5y ago>> 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.
- bullen 5y agoWhere are the Gflops/W?
- d33 5y agoAs 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 xuántiě, which makes it possible to properly pronounce without extra context. In Chinese characters it's 玄铁 in simplified and 玄鐵 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.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoMaybe 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 https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%8E%84%E9%93%81/2949942
- paradite 5y agoThese 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/Chinese_mythology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuxia 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 5y agoBy 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.
- paradite 5y agoI must apologize if I made you feel like it is a criticism. I think national/cultural pride is a pretty positive thing, at least in China.
- throwaway4good 5y agoSo 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 5y agoCould 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.
- eunos 5y agoWhat does it mean by open sourcing chips? Does that mean I can bring the source to fabs and fabricate them out?
- brucehoult 5y agoIt'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.
- adrian_b 5y agoThe 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 5y agoI 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.
- farseer 5y agoThat means they are giving up on risc-v? The future is arm for them it seems.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]