Alibaba will use a large number of ARM processors Intel how to do?

Earlier this month, ARM Holdings said it will cooperate with Alibaba Group in the data center business, and the parent company Softbank is also the largest shareholder of the latter. It is reported that Alibaba will use ARM-designed low-power processors on its own data center servers and gradually replace Intel products.

Alibaba has a data center that operates e-commerce business, and also provides services such as Alibaba Cloud; ARM is the leader in chip architecture design, providing IP licensing for semiconductor companies such as Qualcomm and MTK. This should be the first big move after Softbank’s $32 billion acquisition of ARM, and is Alibaba only accepting cooperation for reasons such as power saving?

Ali's abacus: launching its own processor?

Considering the relationship with Softbank, it is reasonable for Alibaba's servers to use ARM processors, which are inherently energy-efficient. The ARM processor has lower power consumption than the X86 architecture, and the problem of insufficient performance can be compensated by multiple cores, which is suitable for forming a high-density server array. The data centers of foreign companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon all have ARM processors, and Alibaba, which requires a large number of servers, is no exception.

It is reported that Alibaba has already tried the 16nm HiSilicon processor, and after strengthening cooperation with Softbank, it can also learn from Amazon to launch its own processor. At the beginning of the year, Amazon began shipping Alpine processors based on ARM architecture, mainly for WiFi routers, NAS, streaming media servers, secure storage, application virtualization, IoT IoT and cloud applications. QNAP and Synology products are used.

ARM's attack: server market share of 20%

In the field of mobile chips, ARM-based processors account for almost all of the market share, and the server chip market is just the opposite – Intel officials say the share is over 99%. ARM has also been eyeing the server chip market, saying that it will gain a 20% share after 2020, and Qualcomm will act as a pawn. In October last year, Qualcomm released a 24-core processor and established a joint venture with the Guizhou government to develop and sell server chips for use in China.

Recently, the first 10nm server chip Centriq 2400 was demonstrated, using 48 custom ARMv8 cores, which will be officially commercialized as early as the second half of 2017. The Centriq 2400 is designed primarily for the data center. It can be seen that Qualcomm also realized that although the ARM processor consumes very little power, server vendors still have doubts about its performance.

The dilemma of allies: return to the X86 architecture

In addition to ARM Holdings and Qualcomm, AMD in the X86 market is also trying to open the server market with ARM-based processors.

Four years ago, AMD announced the alliance of ARM, plans to launch a low-power server chip based on the A57 core, followed by Project Skybridge compatible with ARM and X86, and high-performance K12 architecture independently developed.

However, the "Seattle" processor that was originally scheduled to be released in mid-2014 will not be shipped until the beginning of this year. The 28nm process is used. The TDP is up to 32W and the price is around $150.

In August, CEO Su Zifeng said in an interview that due to the low market acceptance of ARM processors, the high-performance K12 architecture developed independently should be postponed until 2017. She believes that ARM's demand in the data center market still has enough space, AMD will not completely withdraw from the ARM server market (turning over the X86 architecture of the Zen processor).

Giant's dominance: integrated FPGA chip

Although ARM is trying to achieve "curve overtaking" by pre-empting the 10/7nm process, rival Intel will not sit idly by - at the end of last year, it spent $16.7 billion to acquire FPGA chip maker Altera.

Microsoft's Office 365 and Azure cloud services use FPGA chips, which can reduce the cost by 30% and 10% of power consumption. Intel said that the Xeon E5 2600 v4 processor has an performance improvement of 70% per watt after integrating the FPGA chip.

In addition to performance, Intel has ARM's unpredictable advantages in the server market, which is the extensive ecosystem support and application of hardware and software platforms (the opposite is true in the mobile space). Foreign Cisco, Red Hat, VMware, etc. are all Intel partners, while domestic Alibaba, Baidu cloud, etc. also use Intel Xeon E5 v4 series server chips.

What's interesting is that both sides can't open up the situation in areas where they are good at each other, and perhaps wait until the IoT outbreak of the Internet of Things to see the difference - 2020 is not far away.

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