Alibaba Cloud began to offer its customers a new type instance on the basis of its own 128-nuclear system on the Yitian 710 server level crystal (SOC) presented in October last year. Apparently, the processor developed by the subsidiary Alibaba T-Head is now ready to work alibaba instances. But to try it, companies should receive an invitation from Alibaba, and the number of instances based on Yitian is extremely limited.
The SOC T-HEAD Yitian 710 servers from Alibaba contains 128 Armv9 cores operating at a frequency of 3.20 GHz. It has eight DDR5-4800 memory channels that can provide nuclei throughput up to 307.2 Gbit / s, as well as 96 pCIe 5.0 lines for connecting high-performance solid-state drives, network cards and other devices. Yitian combines 60 billion transistors and is produced using a 5-nanometer process, which makes it one of the most complex processors ever created.
Alibaba did not report anything about the performance offered by its instance, or when the trial period is over. It is also not reported when Yitian 710 processors and Panjiu servers will be available for a wider audience.
But although the availability of Yitian 710 machines is extremely low and so far, not everyone can even try it, it is obvious that Alibaba Cloud seriously refers to the development of a server-level SOC for its cloud services. The main question is how competitives are that these processors and whether they can really replace the central processors AMD and Intel, which today uses the cloud giant.