Apple and Alibaba both unveil new Arm-based chips
Apples's M1 Pro and M1 Max chips feature in the company's latest 14" and 16" MacBook Pro laptops
Apple and Alibaba have both announced new chips based on Arm designs, continuing a trend for hardware vendors and cloud service providers to create their own silicon rather than relying on the major providers like Intel, AMD and TSMC
Apples's new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips feature in the company's latest 14" and 16" MacBook Pro notebooks announced at the firm's Unleashed event yesterday.
They are based on an instruction set from Arm, although the core is Apple's own proprietary design.
The M1 Max chip, contains 57 billion transistors with a 10-core CPU and 32-core GPU, which Apple makes it the most powerful processor it has ever built.
The company says its new chips will draw 30 per cent less power while offering comparable performance to the latest 8-core PC laptop chips running at full speed, although these claims have yet to be tested independently.
Meanwhile, the M1 Pro is an significant update to the current Apple M1 with eight CPU cores compared with the M1's four and 16 GPU cores instead of eight, and double the memory bandwidth too.
Chinese cloud giant Alibaba also unveiled new Arm-based chips, today. The Yitian 710 is based on Arm architecture and will be used in the company's new data centre servers called Panjiu.
"Customising our own server chips is consistent with our ongoing efforts toward boosting our computing capabilities with better performance and improved energy efficiency," said Jeff Zhang, president of Alibaba Cloud.
The Yitian 710 is built on 5nm silicon and features 128 Arm cores, 60 billion transistors and a top clock speed of 3.2 Ghz.
According to Alibaba, benchmark tests on the Yitian 710 revealed a 20 per cent state performance improvement over a ‘state-of-the-art Arm server processor' as well as a 50 per cent increase in energy efficiency, although again these claims have yet to be independently verified.
Alibaba also announced that it will open the source code of its RISC-V based XuanTie processors.
The company believes RISC-V will become widely used in IoT and AI applications because of its open architecture and flexible features. However, currently adoption is stymied by a fragmented set of tools and supporting software, Alibaba says. It has therefore released the source code of the XuanTie series IP cores on GitHub and Open Chip Community.
"By opening up the IP cores of our in-house IoT processors as well as related software stacks and development tools, we aim to assist global developers to build their own RISC-V-based chips in a much more cost-effective way," Zhang said.
Alibaba's move is aligned to the strategy of the Chinese government, which aims to make the country less dependent on the likes of foreign chip vendors. After being sanctioned by the US, Huawei also created its own chips.
The announcements from Apple and Alibaba come at a time when the demand for new silicon is outstripping the supply. Creating their own chips does not make them immune from the situation, although as large companies they will have a strong hand in securing stocks.