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Alibaba's Arm-based 128 core CPU will send a shiver down spines at Intel and AMD

13 points| saqrais | 3 years ago |techradar.com

7 comments

Frankly, ARM server chips have always SEEMED like they held a lot of promise but never delivered on this. If you want power efficiency per-thread, I struggle to see the value of an ARM chip vs a voltage-optimized x64 CPU. It definitely seems like there's an unaddressed market here, but I also feel like if Intel/AMD felt that Amazon Gravity or Alibaba were starting to impact their market share they'd just release TDP-binned server chips.

wmf|3 years ago

I think cost is the main difference.

hyperman1|3 years ago

How does this work out for security bugs?

I would assume the 128 cores share a lot of caches, so a core can leak data to other cores on the same chip.

Hence, a model where individual cores are given to different customers might be a model where these customers can steal data from each other.

wmf|3 years ago

So just like every other chip.

NicoJuicy|3 years ago

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/arm-severs-itself-from-arm...

I suppose this has much to do with it ...

georgia_peach|3 years ago

CPUs don't have the same load profile as GPUs. It could be 256, 512!, 1024!! cores--unless Alibaba has one hell of an innovation on memory bandwidth & consistency, nobody at the big shops is going to care.