Alibaba doubles down on RISC-V architecture with a new secretive 'server-grade' chip that will put AMD and Intel on alert
Is RISC-V the future of compute? Alibaba thinks so as it launches a new server-grade chip that will compete with Xeon and EPYC CPUs
If China ever goes hardcore on open source across the board for all hardware and software, it would absolutely crush the present Western hegemony. It would be the most moral high ground move too.
From what ive heard, these risc v chips have a long way to go for performance. Is that still true?
Yes and no. It would have a long way to go for similar x86 single thread speeds. However, the future will belong to whatever single processor can handle all workloads. The dual processor workloads for GPU and CPU is a temporary hack. Around 8 years from now a new architecture will emerge as dominant. That is the 10 years it takes from idea to real hardware product in silicon. The problem has been obvious for 2 years already. The next architecture must be done from scratch on a level very similar to the gap between RISC-V and x86 right now. So ultimately, it is a no because that redesign renders the lead of the present useless. Present processors are power constrained for the L2 to L1 cache bus width. If all of those bits on the bus are high, it pulls the whole core down. This is where things are optimised for high speed single thread operations like traditional code. Large math tensors need a wide bus to load and offload quickly so it is entirely incompatible. Regardless of the merits of everyone running AI or not, in the data center business where there are very little profit margins, anyone that can make a single processor that can scale to handle both workloads well enough will win out in the long run. This dual processor paradigm has already been tried and failed. When x86 was in the x286 to x386 era a second floating point math unit was required for any advanced workloads like CAD. That created a dual processor architecture that resulted in a flop. Everyone in hardware is aware of this history. Why would anyone support a new grassroots proprietary hardware design for this new generation of hardware that requires a fortune in royalties if a similar processor is negligibly different at the same phase of development and is a free and open instruction set architecture with no royalties. Plus this means that the IC designer is no longer locked into an ecosystem of vendor peripherals. Anyone can design and sell little circuit blocks and on chip peripherals, even proprietary ones, for use on any chip. This is basically true open market capitalism for an ISA. It is a standardized framework for anyone to build on instead of the notoriously authoritarian, oppressive, and anticompetitive Intel. The outcome of that set of constraints seems obvious to me.
Yes, but it doesn't have arm levels of growing pains.
Current risc v SBCs are about 10 years behind performance wise, which isn't as much of a problem. Core count is there, just not single core performance.
i've heard rumors that they've made great surprises and developments so far; but i have nothing substantial to point you to, as it's mostly rumors that i got from friends/other people at this point.
Funny how in "communist" China almost no code is open source. It's almost like it was never about "the people" huh
Can't have the people using unsanctioned software.
Depending on how well/thoroughly it handles it, that could also remove a lot of the worry of companies adding ccp-accessible backdoors.
I'll wait and see when someone finally produces a RISC-V chip that can keep up with the big boys. But they can't even compete with ARM at the moment, so I am not holding my breath.
What, not even an IBM POWER 10 ?
The Power 10 is not RISC-V. It is a RISC processor, namely of the Power ISA architecture, based on the good old PowerPC 601.
I have not dealt with those chips for about 30 years, though.
I'm excited to see more competition! I also like how RISC-V is based on open source work which reduces startup costs and opens up greater collaboration. We've all benefited greatly from open source software, so it would be nice to see more of that on the hardware side as well. I'll be shocked if the chip actually competes on performance, though it may be more of a cost-for-performance deal like ARM. Speaking of which, I wonder how it'll compare with ARM server processors as well.
