On October 19, at the 2021 Yunqi Conference, Pingtou, a semiconductor company under Alibaba, released the self-developed cloud chip Etian 710.
This chip is the most powerful ARM server chip in the industry. Its performance exceeds the industry benchmark by 20%, and its energy efficiency ratio is increased by more than 50%.Etian 710 is an important step for Alibaba Cloud to promote the “one cloud with multiple cores” strategy. It is also Alibaba’s first CPU chip for the cloud, which will be deployed in the Alibaba Cloud data center.
Etian 710 adopts the industry’s most advanced 5nm process, and a single chip can accommodate up to 60 billion transistors. On the chip architecture, based on the latest ARMv9 architecture, it contains a 128-core CPU with a clock speed of up to 3.2GHz, which can take into account both performance and power consumption. In terms of memory and interfaces, it integrates the industry’s most advanced DDR5, PCIe5.0 and other technologies, which can effectively increase the transmission rate of the chip and can be adapted to different application scenarios of the cloud.
According to reports, prior to this, the most advanced process for server chips was still 7nm, and Etian 710 was the first to achieve a higher process and was the first server chip to use 5nm process. The 5nm process has extremely high requirements for energy density and the layout of the internal structure of the chip. During the development process, Pingtou flexibly schedules up to 30 different EDA software, in-depth customized clock networks and customized IP technology. In addition, Pingtou also uses advanced Multi-chip stacking technology finally successfully ensured the optimization of chip performance and power consumption.
In order to solve the bandwidth bottleneck under the conditions of high concurrency of cloud computing, Etian 710 has carried out a special optimization design for on-chip interconnection. Through a new flow control algorithm, system congestion is effectively relieved, thereby improving system efficiency and scalability. In the standard test set SPECint2017, the score of Etian 710 reached 440, which exceeded the industry benchmark by 20%, and the energy efficiency ratio increased by more than 50%.
Cloud is the largest application scenario for high-performance server chips. Etian 710 is designed for the high concurrency, high performance, and high energy efficiency requirements of cloud scenarios. It combines leading chip design technology with the unique requirements of cloud scenarios to finally achieve a breakthrough in performance and energy efficiency ratio. At present, Alibaba Cloud is fully compatible with mainstream chip architectures such as x86, ARM, and RISC-V. The self-developed Yitian 710 has further enriched the underlying technical architecture of Alibaba Cloud and cooperated with Feitian operating system to provide cloud customers with cost-effective cloud services. .
General-purpose processor chips are one of the most complex chips in the data center. Its architecture is complex and requires extremely high performance and power consumption. Up to now, there are few companies with this technical strength. At present, Intel, AMD, AWS and A few companies such as Ali Pingtou are in this list.
In the past, Pingtou has accumulated rich experience in AI chip and processor IP design, which is the basis for Pingtou to break through the research and development technology of general chips.For Pingtou, Etian 710 chip is the first general-purpose server chip，The successful development of Yitian chips indicates that Pingtou has the ability to develop and design large and complex chips and has entered the ranks of first-class chip companies.
Zhang Jianfeng, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence and Dean of Dharma Academy, said: “Based on Alibaba Cloud’s business strategy of “one cloud, multiple cores” and “building a deep foundation”, we released Etian 710, hoping to meet the diverse computing needs of customers.This chip is not for sale, mainly for Alibaba Cloud’s own use. We will continue to maintain close cooperation with partners such as Intel, Nvidia, AMD, ARM, etc., to provide customers with more choices. “
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