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Alibaba Open Source XuanTie RISC-V Cores, Introduces In-House Armv9 Server Chip

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Re: Alibaba Open Source XuanTie RISC-V Cores, Introduces In-House Armv9 Server Chip

#21

Post by easygenes »

maxpert wrote: post #5

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.

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/

Re: Alibaba Open Source XuanTie RISC-V Cores, Introduces In-House Armv9 Server Chip

#22

Post by dustintrex »

easygenes wrote: post #21
maxpert wrote: post #5

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.

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 T…

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.

Re: Alibaba Open Source XuanTie RISC-V Cores, Introduces In-House Armv9 Server Chip

#25

Post by rjzzleep »

easygenes wrote: post #21
maxpert wrote: post #5

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.

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 T…

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.

Re: Alibaba Open Source XuanTie RISC-V Cores, Introduces In-House Armv9 Server Chip

#27

Post by MobiusHorizons »

brucehoult wrote: post #19
MobiusHorizons wrote: post #11

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

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 publi…

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.

Re: Alibaba Open Source XuanTie RISC-V Cores, Introduces In-House Armv9 Server Chip

#28

Post by easygenes »

rjzzleep wrote: post #25
easygenes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 T…

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.

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

Re: Alibaba Open Source XuanTie RISC-V Cores, Introduces In-House Armv9 Server Chip

#29

Post by brucehoult »

rjzzleep wrote: post #25
easygenes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 T…

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.

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.

Re: Alibaba Open Source XuanTie RISC-V Cores, Introduces In-House Armv9 Server Chip

#30

Post by KingMachiavelli »

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 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).
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