Alibaba’s Self-Developed CPU Yitian 710 Sees Large-Scale Commercial Use

On November 3, Zhang Jianfeng, President of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, announced that the self-developed Cloud-native processor “Yitian 710” has now been put into large scale use in several commercial fields. Zhang said that when adopting the Yitian 710 cloud instance, the cost performance of computing power has been improved by over 30%, and the power consumption per unit has been reduced by 60%. Over the next two years, 20% of Alibaba‘s new computing power will use this self-developed CPU.

At the 2021 Alibaba Apsara Conference held in October last year, the Yitian 710 was officially launched, establishing it as the company’s first CPU for the cloud field and making Alibaba the third cloud computing firm in the world with a self-developed ARM architecture chip after Amazon and Huawei.

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The Yitian 710 can accommodate up to 60 billion transistors on a single chip. Based on current standards, Yitian 710 scores 440, exceeding the industry benchmark by 20%, and increases the energy efficiency ratio by more than 50%. It can effectively help data centers save energy and reduce emissions.

The Yitian 710 was first put into use during Alibaba‘s Double Eleven Shopping Festival in November 2021. As the company manages more than 1.5 million servers worldwide, the company has used the processor for Alibaba Data Centers on a large scale, thus supporting storage, databases, big data, video cloud and other fields.

This year, with the help of Alibaba Cloud, the computing power provided by Yitian 710 has also been adopted by other industry companies other than Alibaba itself. According to Alibaba, some well-known Chinese enterprises in scientific computing, the smartphone industry and Internet have significantly improved their cost performance after migrating to the Yitian 710 cloud instance.

In the past thirteen years, Alibaba Cloud has been deeply involved in operating systems, databases, storage, networks and chips, and has made a series of important achievements. It is the only cloud service provider in China with a complete self-developed software and hardware technology system. “The development of cloud computing has entered a new stage. In the next decade, the self-developed computing system integrating software and hardware is the foundation of cloud service providers. Only continuous innovation in the research and development of core technologies and products can help a provider seize an advantage,” said Zhang Jianfeng.

In his speech at the event, Zhang Jianfeng stated that the new computing system with cloud computing as the core is bringing about three major changes. First, the cloud reconstructs the entire IT hardware system, and the industrial chains such as data centers, chips and servers have undergone profound changes. Secondly, the software research and R&D paths have also undergone profound changes, and trends such as serverless, low-code development and AI large model open source have greatly improved software production efficiency. Finally, the integration of cloud and terminal equipment has accelerated, and computing power is transferring from end-user equipment to thr cloud. Soon, everything will be a computer unto itself.