
Details Emerge on China's 64-Core ARM Chip - jonbaer
http://www.nextplatform.com/2016/09/01/details-emerge-chinas-64-core-arm-chip/
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wmf
What the article doesn't mention is that no independent benchmarks will be
released, no English documentation exists, and the chip won't be available
outside China.

~~~
isjustajokebro
Do Intel and Amd release Chinese documentation?

~~~
stass
This is not a fair comparison. English is an international language of science
and technology unlike Chinese and other languages.

~~~
chrischen
That doesn't preclude Chinese from being the same, or becoming the same.

~~~
jomamaxx
"That doesn't preclude Chinese from being the same, or becoming the same."

\+ It won't. The international language already English and that won't change
(India, North America, Europe - most of Africa, the Middle East are already
English as international lang. even China esp. Hong Kong, Singapore) - but
Chinese may become a 'sphere of influence' language in surrounding countries -
much like Spanish or French. Of course it kind of that already.

\+ The issue of not releasing documentation in English is odd, given that
English docs would enable them to access maybe a 5x greater market. And for
the cost of what? Clearly, it's a strategic decision on their part - there's
some kind of impetus behind it. Possibly they don't think it's ready. Who
knows? But it's not likely an oversight. It was a decision.

~~~
makmanalp
> \+ It won't.

I believe that's what they said about Latin at some point!

~~~
JimmyAustin
The long tail of available English content that is available on the internet
will ensure that it remains dominant. Latin never had the sheer quantity of
content that English has.

~~~
DoubleMalt
And Greek did not have the sheer content Latin had. Still Latin was replaced.

------
biot
Is Phytium owned by the Chinese government? Otherwise, why call it China's
chip? It's like saying America's Xeon.

~~~
rch
I've been thinking about this lately: what's the difference between how China
supports companies, and the U.S. giving Intel a big DOE contract?

~~~
twblalock
Honestly not a lot. People who complain about the Chinese government helping
Chinese companies need to recognize that the US has been doing similar things
for decades. China does seem to give more support to its companies than the US
does, but that's a difference of degree, not of kind. In fact, the development
of Silicon Valley as a tech hub in the first place was heavily dependent on
the military-industrial complex -- Fairchild had considerable military
contracts, for example, and the companies that followed have had such
contracts as well.

This is a situation where free trade and national security can be in conflict
-- it would simply be irresponsible for the US or China to trust non-domestic
companies with military projects, satellites, etc. But most of the companies
that work on those projects also compete in the consumer market, where
government subsidies are considered trade barriers.

~~~
jomamaxx
"Honestly not a lot." and "China does seem to give more support to its
companies than the US does, but that's a difference of degree, not of kind."

I'm sorry but this is not true.

Chinese companies are often a direct part of national strategy and are created
by, led by, supported by and defended by the state.

The collusion between many Chinese companies often goes far, far beyond
'government contracts'.

It's rational for any government to prefer local companies for strategic
purchases, particularly military etc.. Nobody is going to bat an eye if a
state related carrier choses to buy planes from their national aerospace
entity.

But China will force companies from other countries to give up their IP - then
hand it over to state-owned or related companies, then 'hold up' the foreign
company in approval processes and other forms of tariff barriers - while the
'state owned' company gets a head start in the local market.

And obviously having direct government ownership in many of these companies
means a material intervention far beyond what the US does. The US does not own
any piece of Apple or Intel, and makes investments in entities like GM only
very reluctantly under negative conditions to keep them alive - not to promote
a national strategy.

Finally - because of the heavy state owned banking system and the total
political control over monetary policy - issues like lending and financing are
also heavily politicized, which is another form of direct state intervention.

The means by which the US or UK intervene are on average completely different
from how it's often done in China.

~~~
tomcam
This all factually correct. Cannot understand reason for downvotes. Also have
done business in China for 15 years.

~~~
jomamaxx
Of course it is. It's pretty well established and public knowledge, there's
not controversy in that statement.

But it goes against an emotional kind of a 'morally relativistic' view of
other cultures one must have to be politically correct.

A statement that is 'against China', even if factual, will be perceived as
some kind of 'bigotry' or 'prejudice' or 'racist sentiment' by those with a
social/utopian view of the world.

I find young people are especially like this.

~~~
jomamaxx
"You enumerated differences in degree"

Totally false. I iterated several ways in which the Chinese government
intervenes that the US and other countries do not.

In case you had trouble reading:

1) The Chinese government creates many companies companies for strategic
purposes. The US does not. Some Euro companies do, in limited situations -
mostly around energy, military and aviation.

2) The Chinese government takes a direct financial interest in many industries
and companies. The US does not, again, unless it's a reluctant, temporary
bailout which is a totally different thing. Even when they do 'bail out' \-
they don't sit on the board, or give orders - it's just financial.

3) The Chinese government owns the banking system - and government officials
require state banks to make investments in specific companies. The US does not
do this.

4) The Chinese government has political control over their 'Central Bank' and
has currency and capital controls. They use these measures for a lot of things
- but one is to create financing for the state banks to make their industrial
investments. The US does not do this.

5) The Chinese government requires foreign entities to give up Intellectual
Property in order to sell into their market - even for consumer products etc.
The US does not do this.

6) The Chinese government uses IP gained from this practice - and from
industrial espionage to create state-owned competitors. The US does not do
this. (There's little for the US to steal, admittedly, they will do this for
military programs - but not commercial ventures).

You must had difficulty reading?

I totally contradicted your comment.

The means by which China intervenes is fundamentally different than the means
by which the US and Western countries intervene.

 _Everybody knows this_.

It's not contentious, it's not a secret, it's not a conspiracy theory.

 _You 're arguing against everyone in business_.

I'll gather that most Hackernews readers have basically no exposure to these
things - that's ok - it's 'hackernews' not 'international business news'.

~~~
twblalock
I didn't have trouble reading.

> 1) The Chinese government creates many companies companies for strategic
> purposes. The US does not. Some Euro companies do, in limited situations -
> mostly around energy, military and aviation.

This is a distiction without a difference. As you said, some European
countries do this too. The US has done so also in the past. Even though it
does not do so today, that doesn't really change the outcome -- US defense
companies are not state-owned, but they promote the state's strategy and
interest just as much as they would if they were state-owned. They also get a
lot of money from the state, probably far more than any state-owned Chinese
companies get.

> 2) The Chinese government takes a direct financial interest in many
> industries and companies. The US does not, again, unless it's a reluctant,
> temporary bailout which is a totally different thing. Even when they do
> 'bail out' \- they don't sit on the board, or give orders - it's just
> financial.

This is another distinction without a difference. The Chinese have influence
on companies by taking a direct financial interest, but that's not the only
way it can be done. The US has just as much influence on a lot of US
companies, and implements its financial interest through government contracts
rather than direct investment. These are simply different ways of achieving
the same outcome.

> 3) The Chinese government owns the banking system - and government officials
> require state banks to make investments in specific companies. The US does
> not do this. 4) The Chinese government has political control over their
> 'Central Bank' and has currency and capital controls. They use these
> measures for a lot of things - but one is to create financing for the state
> banks to make their industrial investments. The US does not do this.

Again, ownership is not required for influence to exist. Anyone who lived
through 2008 and TARP in the US cannot possibly claim there is no political
influence in the banking system. Yeah, the Chinese do it more than the US does
-- but that is a difference of _degree_.

Your point #5 is factually incorrect. There are problems with Chinese IP law
to be sure, but there is not a legal requirement to give up IP rights to do
business in China. Companies that register their IP in China are entitled to
legal protections, just as they would be in the US. If those protections are
not enforced, that's a difference of degree, not of kind.

> 6) The Chinese government uses IP gained from this practice - and from
> industrial espionage to create state-owned competitors. The US does not do
> this. (There's little for the US to steal, admittedly, they will do this for
> military programs - but not commercial ventures).

I'm sure the US does this, and you admitted as much when you said they do this
for military programs. Companies with military contracts overlap into the
commercial and consumer space quite a bit, so it does affect the commercial
market. Yeah, China does more of this -- but that is a difference of _degree_.

The bottom line is that when both countries do a thing, and one of the
countries does more of that thing than the other country, that's a difference
of _degree_.

You seem rather attached to state ownership as some kind of differentiating
feature, but it's really not. China exerts influence by ownership and direct
investment; the US exerts influence via government contracts, which are a form
of indirect investment. The outcome is the same _kind_ of thing -- government
influence over companies. China does it more, which is a difference in
_degree_.

You have not identified any fundamental differences here. All you've done is
show that China does the same things the US does, but more, and possibly more
effectively.

~~~
jomamaxx
"You seem rather attached to state ownership as some kind of differentiating
feature, but it's really not."

Yes - it is - dude.

Buddy - I'm not arguing wit you.

I'm not trying to make a point.

This is well established stuff.

There is no debate here.

You've painted yourself into a corner, saying that 'night is day'.

You're making a fool of yourself.

~~~
twblalock
If you did not want to argue with me, you would not have responded to my posts
multiple times with arguments. Nor would you have tracked down my posts in
other threads and attacked them, which you have done.

------
faragon
That's direct competition for Cavium (american multicore MIPS -max 48
cores/chip on Octeon III SoCs- and ARM -max 48 cores/chip on ThunderX SoCs-
chip maker).

If they manage to sell 64-core ARM chips for 50$, even using just 28nm
(maximum available on mainland China foundries -AFAIK-), it could hurt Cavium
badly and start worrying Intel.

~~~
dogma1138
They aren't going to sell these chips anywhere close to 50$, high end mobile
phone SoC's cost 60-100$ these days, even the Chinese SoC's are not that cheap
MediaTek's Helio X25/X20 are "cheap" because they aren't Snapdragon 823 Exynos
8893 100$ price parts, but they are around 30-50$ also (and could be even
more, since a bargain bin MT6582 MediaTek ARMv7 SoC costs 8-10$).

This isn't going to be fabbed in China, almost none of the chinese SoC's are
fabbed locally the foundries are not built for that the process is too old and
overall they are not intended to produce such complex silicon, there is much
more to a process than just the lithography and even that is not
straightforward because you actually need to do tricks to get to sub 28nm
today as you often end up using higher wavelength light since extreme UV and
other similar technologies aren't there yet.

The 64-core SoC's are going to be multi-100$ parts, probably closer to the
1000$ mark regardless if they are chinese or not, Cavium SoC's are about as
expensive or even more expensive than some of the Intel parts they are
competing against.

If China introduces a 64 core ARMv8 SoC at 50$ Intel won't be worried, it
would panic to the point of them using the backdoor everyone on HN think they
have via AMT rigging the election so Trump can win and then convincing him to
nuke China might actually happen.

That said a 50$ 64 core ARMv8 SoC is pretty much impossible to make even in
China, by China, for China.

~~~
faragon
"That said a 50$ 64 core ARMv8 SoC is pretty much impossible to make even in
China, by China, for China."

Allwinner A20 (4 core ARMv8 Cortex A53, 512KB L2 cache, 128KB L1 cache, 2 core
Mali 400, video interface, etc.) costs 6$ in volume. So I guess just in plain
die area, the 64 core Mars ARMv8 (32MB L2 cache) could take just 8 times the
area of Allwinner A20, without including L3 cache. That would mean 48$ just in
silicon, with naive extrapolation. Also, there are two versions of the chip:
the high-end ("Mars") and a low-end ("Earth"), may be without L3 cache ([1]).

With progressive die reduction, it could be even cheaper, if demand reaches
enough critical mass (e.g. billions of chips for routing devices, servers,
etc.).

In addition to Cavium, there is another potential competitor: Mediatek (after
Atheros aquisition), selling crazy cheap SoCs for SOHO routers. What if they
start in the high-end and server market? (they would need just IP available
from ARM for the inter-core memory routing, for making cheap SoCs).

[1] [https://tweakimg.net/files/upload/HC27.24.320-Mars-64core-
Ga...](https://tweakimg.net/files/upload/HC27.24.320-Mars-64core-Gao-
Phytium-v1.0.pdf)

~~~
xamlhacker
Atheros was acquired by Qualcomm, not Mediatek.

~~~
faragon
Yes, thank you. Mediatek acquired Ralink.

------
niftich
> 128 MB of L3

Wow! I suppose when you have 64 cores to feed...

But what's the play here besides promoting indigenous development? Alone,
these cores are not remarkable, and getting 64 of them fed constantly is only
useful for long-running HPC workloads.

To me the most interesting thing here is the 'Hawk' interconnect that allows
some of these dies to be replaced with custom processing units; hardware
encode/decode blocks sn a common option in consumer devices today, but any
custom block can be made for specialized workloads.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Don't some Intel Xeons have 128MiB of L _4_?

But L3 is another story, for sure.

~~~
Coding_Cat
I think the iris graphics ones can use the vram as shared L4, and that's up to
256 MiB IIRC.

------
Animats
2,892 pins, 16 memory controllers. Hm. How much is shared? Is this a cluster
of 4-CPU shared memory multiprocessors on one chip, with inter-system
channels? Or are all the caches linked, so that it looks like one giant
multiprocessor?

This setup has lots of memory boards in sockets, some distance from the CPU.
If you're not sharing memory, it might be faster to have fewer CPUs per chip
and put the CPUs and the memory on the same board.

------
astrodust
It does seem like Intel is going to see their market share in the server space
erode not from traditional competitors like AMD, but by upstarts using ARM.

Intel's Xeon Phi experiment hasn't produced anything cost-effective and
workable yet, but if they can get that to run at low power they might have an
answer to the swarms of ARM systems on the horizon.

~~~
dogma1138
Xeon Phi isn't an answer to ARM, Intel has the Xeon SOC which is directly
competitive with ARM and it's pretty damn good.

[http://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/processors/xeon/xeo...](http://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/processors/xeon/xeon-
processor-d-family.html)

No 64 cores, but 16 X86 Xeon Cores @ 1.3ghz with HyperThreading will give
pretty much any high end ARM SOC a run for their money, a TDP of 45W also
doesn't hurt ;)

Intel has made a bet that by the time ARM would get their performance to x86
levels Intel would get their power consumption to ARM SOC levels and Intel
seem to have been correct on that bet.

The Xeon Phi is also pretty interesting Knight's Landing and onwards provides
pretty good performance for deep-learning and other applications that
companies like NVIDIA were swinging at, it's still not on the same performance
level as NVIDIA's top tier of compute products but it's close and the x86
compatibility is likely to have a sufficient advantage in certain scenarios to
make the Xeon Phi really competitive. NVIDIA was planning on having x86
compatibility for it's HPC parts however both AMD and Intel killed that dream
in court.

~~~
CravAnon
I suspect with the embargo on Intel, China is highly motivated to push ARM
ahead of Intel quickly. If you think Phytium and the Chinese government aren't
tied at the hip you're kidding yourselves. Sure, they can't fab at 14nm but
they likely will soon.

~~~
dogma1138
They can fab on 14/10nm just like all the other Chinese soc companies do,
MediaTek is doing 20, 16 and 10nm SoC's if they couldn't they wouldn't be
competitive regardless of their price.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
They sure can fab it elsewhere, just not in mainland china is what he meant
imho.

~~~
dogma1138
But they aren't fabbing it in mainland China anyhow, these CPUs were fabbed in
TSMC, the 28nm foundries in china aren't really capable of producing silicon
as complex as this one. China will get there, it is a national priority for
them and it is understandable they need to move from being the factory of the
world to becoming an innovation and R&D center sure they are literally hacking
their way there but they'll get there.

China is aggressive and very intelligent with their goals and roadmaps in
complete contrast to other emerging mega-nations like India, and sadly even in
contrast to Europe which seem to have both the financial and the human capital
to become a world leader however lacks the the will and the uniform vision to
achieve that.

Don't get me wrong Europe is doing some amazing things in research especially
in the academic scene and programs like Horizon 2020 are pretty impressive but
they are peanuts in the grand scheme of things, China on the other hand says
in 10 years I want to be able to make X and they get there doesn't matter if X
is canned goods or high end CPUs.

China is the US in the 50's be the 1st in everything, do huge national
projects to get there, invest in science, technology and education all for the
national pride and glory. As much as I'm "scared" of China I really admire
their moonshot spirit in the past decades if they won't implode before getting
there I hope they'll end up being benevolent overlords.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
China will have to get there on their own, however; no one is willing to share
such fab technology with them, or sell them equipment like Germany does for
much of their manufacture base. It will take a while with the current mindset
of cheap/cut corners work, they are having the same problem with jet engines
(more careful and precise, less cheap!). They can't really just throw money at
the problems either...not when management takes huge cuts and then outsources
to the traditional cheap/cut corner vendors.

Or they could just invade Taiwan for its fabs.

