Arm-based Alibaba Cloud T-Head Yitian 710 Crushes SPECrate2017_int_base

We have our first look at a next-generation Arm v9 CPU supporting new features like PCIe Gen5 and DDR5. The T-Head Yitian 710 is Alibaba Cloud’s Arm offering that is expected to be available in September 2022, has an official SPEC CPU2017 integer score listed, and it is a monster result for this 128-core processor.

Arm-based Alibaba Cloud T-Head Yitian 710 Crushes SPECrate2017_int_base

Here is the Alibaba Cloud T-Head Yitan 710 result in one of the company’s Panjiu-M series servers at 510. Here is the incredible result using DDR5 (PC5-4800B-R) memory.

Since the Alibaba T-Head Yitian 710 result was formally submitted, reviewed, and published in the official results list, we can only use those results to compare other processors. As a single socket solution, the Ampere Altra only has the 80 core model in a Gigabyte server at 301.

That is 3.763/ core. Alibaba’s new generation is 3.984/core so it would likely be slightly above the range of an official Ampere Altra Max 128 core 1P system score.

Just for some reference point, an ASUS AMD EPYC 7773X (“Milan-X”) CPU with 64 cores has published results of 440 or 6.875/ core, but with half as many cores and older generation DDR4 (albeit with a larger L3 cache.)

The EPYC 7763 official results for the ASUS server are 436 so even the 3D V-Cache is not helping a lot here.

Here is a list of the current top SPEC CPU2017 integer rate results for single-socket servers:

Alibaba Cloud did not submit floating-point results as those are still dominated by AMD EPYC 7773X results from ASUS, Cisco, HPE, Gigabyte, and Supermicro.

Often cloud providers prioritize integer performance rather than floating-point performance in their processors, and so this may be why those results were not submitted. Also, for those wondering, the fastest Intel single-socket result we could find was for the 36-core Intel Xeon Platinum 8351N, so we excluded that from the results.

Final Words

This is very exciting to see that the Alibaba Cloud team was able to achieve solid numbers with its next-generation PCIe Gen5 and DDR5 chips. While these new T-Head Yitian 710 chips are hitting performance numbers ~16% higher than Milan-X, AMD Genoa‘s top-bin SKUs should offer significant uplift even in this benchmark well beyond 16%. Also, while one may be quick to say that Alibaba will be faster than Ampere just based on these results, Ampere’s next generation is a custom-designed core so hopefully, they will bridge the small performance gap between Alibaba Cloud’s next-generation and Ampere’s 2020 generation with AmpereOne.

Get ready for the next few months!