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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

#161
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 realistic unfortunately

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

#162

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…

I 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)

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In CPU choices, when Apple have lead (PowerPC) nobody followed. Their other CPU choices have hardly been brave. 6502? Not the first. 680x0? Followers. Intel they were way behind and all their laptop and desktop gear was a generation behind everything other companies were using. Phones bit of a mixed bag but their computing gear has always been a bit old hat since the 1980s. The M1 is the first time since PowerPC they…

> In CPU choices, when Apple have lead (PowerPC) nobody followed. PowerPC was developed by IBM. Apple got involved when Motorola could not deliver a faster 68k to beat Intel's 486 which was passing 50MHz. So they joined IBM along with Motorola and formed the AIM alliance (Apple, IBM, Motorola) to build better processors. > The M1 is the first time since PowerPC they took a risk. There's little to no risc (buh-dum-tis…

It's not that Motorola failed to delivery a faster 68k, it's that IBM's actions forced them to invest in PowerPC at a time when they should have been focused on advancing 68k. The 68040 was quite competitive at the time with performance that beat the Pentium. And any time a company is forced to split resources across multiple product lines, none of the projects will be as successful as a more focused competitor. Since Intel had gobs more revenue from x86 than Motorola had from both PowerPC and 68k lines at the same time, Intel was instead able to invest more in development of x86 with multiple teams without the distraction of supporting dual architectures. Intel's progress accelerated while Motorola's limited resources were diluted across projects that didn't have any common infrastructure.

The complexity of developing validation tests suites for PowerPC alone would have sucked up all the software resources inside of Motorola at the time, as all the old 68k OSes and support code, etc had to be rebuilt from scratch for PowerPC. Not at all a small undertaking.

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