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

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.

&gt; In-House Armv9?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semianalysis.com&#x2F;the-semiconductor-heist-of-the-century-arm-china-has-gone-completely-rogue-operating-as-an-independent-company-with-their-own-ip&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;semianalysis.com&#x2F;the-semiconductor-heist-of-the-cent...</a><p>(discussed recently: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28329731" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28329731</a>)

Here are the RISV-V cores: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;T-head-Semi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;T-head-Semi</a>

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&#x27;s 玄铁 in simplified and 玄鐵 in traditional script. The meaning is &quot;reddish-black iron&quot;. I&#x27;m curious if it should be taken literally or if it&#x27;s a cultural reference of some sort.

I wonder if they will sell the Yitian 710 directly since I&#x27;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 &lt; 10 minutes.<p>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 servers but it feels overkill for what are currently just personal projects (NixOS stuff).

So I assume that they didn&#x27;t open source their leading RISC-V core because they were giving up on RISC-V, but instead because they have something better, more powerful in the pipeline.<p>Does that mean that we are going to see soon a data center class RISC-V chip with hundreds of RISC-V cores? That would really be something.

Does anyone have any data on benchmarks for the Risc-V cores? I wasn&#x27;t able to find any. I&#x27;m specifically interested in the C906 (aka Allwinner D1 which exists as a dev board[0] for ~$120 ) and the C910 which is apparently multicore. I&#x27;d love to know how they compare to SiFive&#x27;s offerings and similar class arm chips.<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aliexpress.com&#x2F;item&#x2F;1005002856721588.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aliexpress.com&#x2F;item&#x2F;1005002856721588.html</a>

Every time I see a headline with RISC-V in it I get excited, but then immediately disappointed that it still isn&#x27;t a widely accessible product.

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

Is C910 out in the wild? Are there any dev boards with it?

That means they are giving up on risc-v? The future is arm for them it seems.

Where are the Gflops&#x2F;W?

Gamechanger

Did anyone instantly go back to the memory of the Jack Ma &amp; Elon Musk conference panel WTF? moment and think: No way Jack is running this company, at all.

A new &#x27;Weex&#x27;,like Alibaba before, boast to the sky.

&gt;&gt;if we compare it to some recent measurements of Ampere Altra, AMD EPYC, and Intel Xeon, taken by Andrei over at AnandTech, the Yitian 710 should be fairly competitive at 128 cores.<p>Impressive. I did not expect riscv to progress so quickly. Intel is much weaker than we all thought after all. Hats off to these clever engineers.