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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

#101

Post by knolax »

paradite wrote: post #90
d33 wrote: post #79

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 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…

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.

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.

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

#102

Post by liuw »

paradite wrote: post #90
d33 wrote: post #79

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 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…

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.

武侠 (Wuxia) culture is big in Alibaba. Everyone has a 花名 (alias / nickname) in the company. In the early days, people just picked names from 金庸 (Jin Yong)'s novels. Jack Ma's 花名 is 风清扬, who is a great sword master in one of the novels. Source: I had a short stint there.

Picking 玄铁, 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.

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

#103

Post by adrian_b »

eunos wrote: post #98

What does it mean by open sourcing chips? Does that mean I can bring the source to fabs and fabricate them out?

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.

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

#104

Post by dragonelite »

codezero wrote: post #48
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.

Intel is counting on being nationalized.

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.

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

#105

Post by anthk »

Symbiote wrote: post #96
easygenes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 manufactu…

The average consumer cost for 1kWh of electricity in the EU is 20¢. A well-used server might consume 500W on average. units '500W * 1 year * 0.20 €/kWh' '€' € 876 I'm sure businesses get a discount, but we haven't paid for cooling yet. This is hardly a rounding error.

Which units is that? Mine does return stuff in Euros but with a fraction.

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

#106

Post by easygenes »

klelatti wrote: post #97
easygenes wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

These are AC costs not total costs and the $8m is probably an annual figure - although it's not clear.

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.missioncriticalmagazine.com/ext/resources/MC/Home/Files/PDFs/(TUI3011B)SimpleModelDetermingTrueTCO.pdf

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

#107

Post by BiteCode_dev »

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.

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...

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

#108

Post by wongarsu »

regularfry wrote: post #69
a-dub wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

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).

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

#109

Post by raverbashing »

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…

> 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.

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

#110

Post by sitkack »

brucehoult wrote: post #46
redundantly wrote: post #24

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.

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 a…

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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