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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

#51

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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.

> 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.

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

#52

Post by LegitShady »

shrewduser wrote: post #15
chorsestudios wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the current semiconductor shortages I don’t think Intel will have any trouble selling chips within the next couple years.

Sure... but what happens on the other side of these unusual market conditions?

amd survived for a long time with worse chips and someone else's fab. Intel has their own fabs and the runway needed to get back in the game.

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

#53

Post by Mikeb85 »

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…

Did you forget about Amazon and Google Arm servers? It's not just Apple, everyone is moving away from x86.

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

#54

Post by ivalm »

imwillofficial wrote: post #18
ivalm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think alderlake is very promising. Big-small designed cpus, even on x86, seem like the way to go.

The way to go for what?

Mobile/laptops eg the sector where apple/ms are switching. Big-small is the way to get high power efficiency.

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

#55

Post by semi-extrinsic »

loeg wrote: post #45
PeterisP wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO server marketshare is much more fickle than the consumer one. For consumers, compatibility is a big issue and hard to switch unless a myriad of things work properly. For servers, if just a single commonly used system (e.g. mariadb or wordpress) works and you can do it 10% cheaper, companies can replace large quantities of hardware to a completely different architecture.

Server marketshare has been fairly sticky -- despite AMD offering low-risk, same ISA migration, and attractive pricing, the server market was relatively slow to adopt Zen.

OTOH, new HPC systems have been quick to adopt Zen in the form of dual-socket EPYC nodes.

Actually if you look at the current top 10 supercomputers, only 2 are Intel. The rest are custom ARM or RISC CPUs (in Japan and China), IBM Power9, or AMD EPYC.

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

#56

Post by snuser »

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.

That feels like a bit of a stretch their core CPUs are still very competitive, they are planning on manufacturing ARM chips as well

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

#57

Post by baq »

imwillofficial wrote: post #18
ivalm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think alderlake is very promising. Big-small designed cpus, even on x86, seem like the way to go.

The way to go for what?

for Intel to not go out of business...?

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

#58

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

loeg wrote: post #45
PeterisP wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO server marketshare is much more fickle than the consumer one. For consumers, compatibility is a big issue and hard to switch unless a myriad of things work properly. For servers, if just a single commonly used system (e.g. mariadb or wordpress) works and you can do it 10% cheaper, companies can replace large quantities of hardware to a completely different architecture.

Server marketshare has been fairly sticky -- despite AMD offering low-risk, same ISA migration, and attractive pricing, the server market was relatively slow to adopt Zen.

My take at this is because of inertia. I have a large fleet of servers that have been Intel since forever. I see no reason to migrate them today as things work reasonably well. We upgrade the hardware every 4-5 years. So during the next upgrade for sure I'll choose AMD, there is no question of that. ARM will be a serious competitor and RISC-V, too, that's for sure - but they are just not there yet when we talk about maximum performance (in our case, energy consumption is not the main concern)

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

#59

Post by rhn_mk1 »

brucehoult wrote: post #29
rjzzleep wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> When you have the complete verilog source code for the CPU core

That's a big "when". The road from an ISA to a core is long, and unless the core is copylefted (this isn't), then you aren't going to get the source code for something someone else manufactured either.

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