Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. on late Monday debuted a custom server chip, the Yitian 710, that will be used in the data centers of the company’s cloud computing business. 

Alibaba is one of China’s largest tech firms. The company operates a range of popular e-commerce platforms and has a presence in other markets as well, including cloud computing. Alibaba last April announced plans to invest 200 billion yuan, then the equivalent of about $28.26 billion, into its cloud business over three years and said the initiative will place an emphasis on developing new infrastructure technologies.

The newly debuted Yitian 710 is based on a chip architecture from Arm Ltd., according to CNBC. Arm’s chip architectures are used in many kinds of processors across devices ranging from data center servers to “internet of things” systems. 

According to ZDnet, the Yitian 710 includes 128 cores that can run at a maximum frequency of 3.2 gigahertz. There are reportedly also eight DDR5 channels for attaching random-access memory and 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes that can be used to link additional hardware components to the chip. 

Each Yitian 710 includes some 60 billion transistors. The processor is said to be based on a five-nanometer manufacturing process, the most advanced chip fabrication technology that is commercially available today.

Alibaba plans to use the Yitian 710 in a new server called Panjiu that is also based on a custom design. The company reportedly won’t sell the chips and servers directly to customers, but rather make them available through its public cloud platform.

Alongside the announcement of the Yitian 710 and Panjiu server, Alibaba said it’s open-sourcing several custom processor core designs based on the RISC-V architecture. The company plans to release additional core designs in the future. Additionally, Alibaba will share a number of associated software components with the open-source community.

Previously, Alibaba in 2019 detailed the Hanguang 800, a custom processor specifically optimized for artificial intelligence workloads. At the time, Alibaba said that it was using the processor internally to perform tasks such as delivering product recommendations. The Hanguang 800 was described as being capable of performing in five minutes some computations that previously took one hour to complete.

Other cloud providers have also developed custom chips for their data centers. Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC both offer infrastructure services based on internally designed silicon, while Microsoft Corp. has reportedly been working to develop custom processors for Azure since at least 2020. 

Image: Alibaba