China in a bull shop: One of the largest Chinese tech companies has announced a 'game-changing' 3,072-core RISC-V server that used an indigeneous CPU on
US soil

Date:
Sat, 25 Nov 2023 06:00:55 +0000

Description:
China hits a key milestone with Alibaba demonstrating the first cloud server powered by a RISC-V chip.

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Chinese tech giant Alibaba has claimed it has built the first commercial server powered by a processor designed on the RISC-V CPU architecture , astonishingly announcing this news in the US at this year's RISC-V Summit.

As reported by HPCWire , the system, made using an indigenous Sophon SG2042 chip, is a gigantic 3,072-core server with 48 nodes that's been deployed at Shandong Univeristy in China. It's the first cloud-facing commercial server built with RISC-V processors. Each processor has 64 cores, with a 2GHz frequency, 64MB system cache and connectivity through PCIe 4.0.

It means China has beaten the US in a key milestone in the race to expand the RISC-V ecosystem and the adoption of the embryonic chip architecutre, especially with the US government showing great interest in the technology. Entering RISC-V political territory

First touted as a University of California project in 2010, the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA) has grown from strength to strength in recent years. Its aim is to rivalboth the prevalent ISAs within the next decade or so: x86 which both Intel and AMD specialize in and ARM.

Both ARM and RISC-V are reduced instruction set computing (RISC) CPU architectures, but the main difference is that ARM is proprietary technology, while RISC-V is an open source alternative. This means it's free-to-license, which lowers the barrier of entry.

Indeed, x86 architectures are also closed source, making RISC-V one of the best candidates for an open and widely used ISA in the future. Big companies are buying into it, with Qualcomm, for example, creating a RISC-V Snapdragon Wearable platform that will power future Wear OS devices.

Given that RISC-V is an open standards, with technologists around the world contributing to its development, China reaching a key milestone in the race
to the RISC-V ecosystem is particularly politically relevant.

Lawmakers in the US are concerned China might be exploiting the open nature
of collaboration between predominately US companies to boost its own semiconductor industry which could eat into the West's advantage, according to Reuters . This is particularly relevant considering the trade tensions,
and recent developments in which the US blocked exporting high-end AI chips
to China. More from TechRadar Pro Alibaba scraps plans to spin off its cloud business Alibaba cloud review : Should you host with the cloud giant? These are the best cloud storage platforms out there



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/pro/china-in-a-bull-shop-one-of-the-largest-chinese- tech-companies-has-announced-a-game-changing-3072-core-risc-v-server-that-used -an-indigeneous-cpu-on-us-soil


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