Hello everyone, welcome to our program content, this program we will pay attention to the
Alibaba AI chip related topics.
It is reported that Ali Dharma Institute recently successfully developed a new architecture
chip.
The chip is the world's first DRAM based 3D bonding stack memory integrated AI chip, which
can break through the performance bottleneck of Von Neumann architecture and meet the demand
for high bandwidth, high capacity memory and extreme computing power in artificial intelligence
scenarios.
In specific AI scenarios, the chip's performance is improved by more than 10 times and the
energy efficiency ratio is improved by up to 300 times.
In the background of Moore's Law slowing down, memory integration becomes the key technology
to solve the bottleneck of computer performance.
The integrated memory chip is similar to the human brain.
The integration of data storage unit and computing unit can greatly reduce data handling, thus
greatly improving computing parallelism and energy efficiency.
2021 Cloud computing Conference site, Alibaba's semiconductor company Pingtou brother released
their own research cloud chip e-Ten 710.
The chip is the strongest ARM server chip in the industry, with performance exceeding
the industry benchmark by 20% and energy efficiency ratio increasing by more than 50%.
Yitian 710 is an important step for Ali Cloud to promote the strategy of "multi-core cloud".
It is also ali cloud's first CPU chip born for cloud and will be deployed in The data
center of Ali Cloud.
E-ten 710 adopts the industry's most advanced 5nm process and can accommodate up to 60 billion
transistors on a single chip.
In the chip architecture, based on the latest ARMv9 architecture, it contains a 128-core
CPU with a maximum frequency of 3.2GHz, which can take into account both performance and
power consumption.
In terms of memory and interface, it integrates the industry's leading DDR5 and PCIe5.0 technologies
to effectively improve the transmission rate of chips and adapt to different cloud application
scenarios.
Zhang Jianfeng, President of Ali Cloud Intelligence and President of Dharma Institute, said, "Based
on ali Cloud's business strategy of 'multi-core cloud' and 'deep foundation', we release Yitian
710, hoping to meet the diverse computing needs of customers.
This chip is not for sale, but mainly for ali Cloud's own use.
"We will continue to work closely with Intel, Nvidia, AMD, ARM and other partners to provide
customers with more choices."
In order to solve the bandwidth bottleneck under the condition of high concurrency in
cloud computing, e-Tian 710 has carried out a special optimization design for on-chip
interconnection.
Through a new flow control algorithm, it effectively alleviates system congestion, thus improving
system efficiency and scalability.
In the standard test set SPECint2017, the score of e-ten 710 reached 440, exceeding
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.
Designed for the requirements of high concurrency, high performance and high energy efficiency
in cloud scenarios, e-Ten 710 combines leading chip design technology with the unique requirements
of cloud scenarios, and finally achieves a breakthrough in performance and energy efficiency
ratio.
At present, Ali Cloud is fully compatible with x86, ARM, RISC-V and other mainstream
chip architectures.
The self-development of E-Ten 710 further enriches the underlying technical architecture
of Ali Cloud, and collaborates with Feitian operating system to provide cost-effective
cloud services for customers on the cloud.
At present, Pingtou brother has a processor IP, AI chips and general chip product family,
its xuantie series processor shipments have reached 2.5 billion; Alibaba's first chip,
Hanguang 800, which was launched two years ago, has achieved large-scale application,
serving customers in search and recommendation, video live broadcasting and other industries
through Alibaba Cloud.
According to Alibaba, Hanguang 800 is alibaba's first chip, but it is the world's strongest
AI chip.
As a chip mainly used for cloud visual processing scenes, the performance of Light 800 has broken
the record of existing AI chips, leading the world in terms of performance and energy efficiency
ratio The integration of storage and computing is
different from the von Neumann architecture that computers have been following for the
past 70 years.
As the world enters the era of artificial intelligence, the demand for high bandwidth
and low power consumption in computing scenarios increases, and the industry pays more attention
to the concept of "integration of storage and computing".
Recently, a study by Alibaba Has brought the concept back to the forefront: Alibaba Cloud
revealed in a statement that it has successfully developed an all-in-one MEMORY AI chip, which
alibaba cloud says is the world's first DRAM based 3D bonded stacked all-in-one memory
chip.
Close the distance - mutual coexistence - integration, memory chip is developing along such a technical
route.
In the von Neumann architecture, data is stored in the data processing process and transmitted
through the data bus.
The integrated memory chip is a combination of storage and computation, which can solve
the "memory wall bottleneck" and "power wall bottleneck" caused by data transfer from memory
to processor.
"Deposit-computing integration technology is subverting the traditional von Neumann
architecture and is the future trend."
Ccid think tank information and software industry research institute senior consultant Zhong
Xinlong pointed out.
For the development of computing and storage integration architecture in a broad sense,
the research of computing and storage integration is not accomplished overnight.
Alidamodayam believes that the integration of storage and computing is following a "three-step
strategy" development.
The first step is the short-term strategy.
The key is to shorten the distance between the storage unit and the computing unit through
chip design, integration and packaging, increase bandwidth, reduce the cost of data transport,
and alleviate the bottleneck caused by data transport.
Ali Dharma institute called it "near-memory chip", which is the 3D bonded stack memory
chip based on DRAM.
The second step is medium-term planning, through the innovation of architecture, memory in
the computing unit or computing unit in the storage module, to realize the integration
of computing and storage.
The third step is the long-term outlook, through the innovation of device level, realize the
device is both storage unit and computing unit, regardless of each other, integration,
become the real integration of computing and storage.
"From experimental products to mass adoption in consumer and enterprise markets, it may
take 10 years or more to realize iterative optimization and continuous improvement of
technology."
Zhong xinlong said.
Xu Chang ccid consulting industry of artificial intelligence research center, a senior analyst
pointed out that deposit is one chip to focus on low latency and low power consumption,
high power demand on the edge of computing, apply to the field of deep learning neural
network, especially using battery power of the Internet of things terminal equipment,
such as smart phones, wearable devices, intelligent household, unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs),
smart cameras, hearing AIDS, etc.
Zhong xinlong believes that the integrated memory chip has natural advantages in massive
data computing scenarios, and has broad application prospects in terminals, edge terminals and
cloud.
For example, in VR/AR, unmanned driving, astronomical data calculation, remote sensing image data
analysis and other scenarios, memory and computation integrated chip can play the advantages of
high bandwidth and low power consumption.
In the future, memory and computing will also become a key enable of brain-like computing.
In the wave of AI chips in the past few years, everyone has been criticized is that many
AI chip companies just held a high-profile press conference, but for the landing of the
chip, in fact, there are not too many scenes and ideas.
This is also the crux of the ai industry as a whole.
But for Alibaba, that naturally solves the problem.
Ali Economy has rich AI application scenarios including image and video analysis, search
and recommendation, all of which require ai-specific chips to provide computing power.
On the one hand, Hanguang 800 is built based on these scenarios, and on the other hand,
it feeds the scenarios to improve the computing efficiency in these fields.
It is understood that Hanguang 800 has achieved large-scale application, which is applied
to multiple scenes in Alibaba Group, such as video image recognition/classification/search,
urban brain, etc.
Relying on the rich application scenarios of Alibaba Group, they made a lot of optimization
for the scenarios in the early stage and achieved performance breakthroughs.
In the future, the chip could even be used in areas such as medical imaging and autonomous
driving, alibaba experts stressed.
In the real world, the powerful AI core also performs quite well.
According to the live demonstration of the Computing Conference, it takes 40 traditional
Gpus to process the traffic video of Hangzhou main urban area in real time in the urban
brain with a delay of 300ms, while it only takes 4 gpus to process the traffic video
of Hangzhou main urban area with a delay of 150ms when using the optical 800.
Palitao commodity database adds 1 billion commodity pictures every day, which takes
1 hour to identify with traditional GPU computing power, but can be reduced to 5 minutes with
800 light More importantly, it will not only serve Alibaba's
internal scenarios, but will also be fully open through cloud services.
It is understood that the AI cloud service based on Hanguang 800 has been officially
launched.
Alibaba experts said that In the artificial intelligence scene, Hanguang 800 is a good
complement to traditional heterogeneous computing, alibaba Cloud can provide more choices for
enterprises, they will launch more forms of ARTIFICIAL intelligence chips in the future,
there will be more large-scale deployment and application in terminals, cloud data centers.
"For enterprises with limited computing power, Hanguang 800 can run more complex and advanced
algorithms more efficiently," Alibaba said, citing examples
Over the past decade, Alibaba's AI and cloud computing have gone hand in hand to become
global leaders in both areas.
The layout of the chip field has made up a major weakness of Ali's technology territory.
More importantly, the chemical reactions in the three fields have been shown:
As one of the industry's largest carriers of artificial intelligence, alibaba has a
lot of application scenarios, the school has been built on top of this dharma algorithm
system covers speech intelligence, language technology, machine vision, intelligent decision-making,
such as direction, and many of the world's leading level results, published in top international
academic conference, a total of nearly 400 top papers; Aliyun ranks among the top three
cloud computing vendors in the world and the first in the Asia-Pacific region.
More than half of China's A-share listed companies and 80% of China's science and technology
enterprises use aliyun's services.
For example, the algorithm ability based on Damoyuan broke the gap between algorithm and
hardware.
Based on the advantages of Aliyun Feitian cloud platform, the integrated chip ecology
of end cloud is rapidly formed.
Xuantieseries processors and Bladeless platform greatly reduce the threshold of terminal chip
design.
Hanguang 800 is exported to the whole society through Aliyun, so that enterprises can enjoy
the ultimate computing power anytime and anywhere In addition, Alibaba's Flat brother will also
set up chip open community, to further provide a platform for open cooperation for the chip
industry; The company will continue to develop operating systems, software and hardware fusion
algorithms, core IP, etc.
Taking these common technologies and refining them to become competitive and ecological,
and then opening them up to partners to build chip products based on high-quality infrastructure,
will help improve the overall competitiveness of the industry.
With this series of leading products, Alibaba has a head start on AIoT that no other manufacturer
has.
Standing on the wind of the future trillion market
That's all for this episode, thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time!