6 ms·

Could it be that they have given up on Risc Five in favour of ARM V8 and V9?

adrian_b 5y ago
The announce of open-sourcing the RISC-V cores on which they have worked until last year was simultaneous with the announcement of a high performance server CPU using the latest ARMv9 cores, to be used in their data centers. So, yes, I would guess that after playing with RISC-V for a couple of years they have switched to ARMv9 for the real thing. One of the cores that have been open-sourced now was in 2020 the fastest RISC-V core ever designed, but for the best performance they had to correct a blatant omission in the RISC-V ISA and add a custom extension for indexed addressing.
- analognoise 5y ago
  I thought the Chinese don't have access to the latest ARM cores anymore - they were cut off because ARM China essentially went rogue and was taken over by Chinese interests?
  - adrian_b 5y ago
    The new CPU announced by Alibaba uses the ARMv9 ISA and new cores, which were announced publicly only earlier this year, long after the parent ARM company had cut the links with the rogue China subsidiary. So I assume that Alibaba must have licensed the cores directly from the parent ARM company.
- throwaway4good 5y ago
  Or maybe it is just too early for a high-end datacenter CPU to be based on RISC-V? The cores are not as fast and the software probably isn't there. I doubt Alibaba would open source with so much fanfare if they were giving up on RISC-V.
- monocasa 5y ago
  A company as big as Alibaba isn't putting all of their eggs in one basket. They've probably been playing with both RISC-V and ARM, and will continue to do so. It makes sense to do that even just to hedge against ARM and be in a better negotiating position for negotiating license fees with ARM. 'Wow, those prices are a bit high, would be a shame if someone released even faster RISC-V cores and took the margin out of your mid range offerings...' Additionally, these cores are all very competitive.. in their gate count niche. There's plenty of places for Alibaba to use cores like this that aren't top of the line server processors. So I'd be shocked if they don't continue to play both sides.

The announce of open-sourcing the RISC-V cores on which they have worked until last year was simultaneous with the announcement of a high performance server CPU using the latest ARMv9 cores, to be used in their data centers. So, yes, I would guess that after playing with RISC-V for a couple of years they have switched to ARMv9 for the real thing. One of the cores that have been open-sourced now was in 2020 the fastest RISC-V core ever designed, but for the best performance they had to correct a blatant omission in the RISC-V ISA and add a custom extension for indexed addressing.

analognoise 5y ago
I thought the Chinese don't have access to the latest ARM cores anymore - they were cut off because ARM China essentially went rogue and was taken over by Chinese interests?
- adrian_b 5y ago
  The new CPU announced by Alibaba uses the ARMv9 ISA and new cores, which were announced publicly only earlier this year, long after the parent ARM company had cut the links with the rogue China subsidiary. So I assume that Alibaba must have licensed the cores directly from the parent ARM company.
throwaway4good 5y ago
Or maybe it is just too early for a high-end datacenter CPU to be based on RISC-V? The cores are not as fast and the software probably isn't there. I doubt Alibaba would open source with so much fanfare if they were giving up on RISC-V.
monocasa 5y ago
A company as big as Alibaba isn't putting all of their eggs in one basket. They've probably been playing with both RISC-V and ARM, and will continue to do so. It makes sense to do that even just to hedge against ARM and be in a better negotiating position for negotiating license fees with ARM. 'Wow, those prices are a bit high, would be a shame if someone released even faster RISC-V cores and took the margin out of your mid range offerings...' Additionally, these cores are all very competitive.. in their gate count niche. There's plenty of places for Alibaba to use cores like this that aren't top of the line server processors. So I'd be shocked if they don't continue to play both sides.