- Both Chinese cloud giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE:BABA) and Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT) Azure has recently launched new instances with SoftBank Group Corp (OTC:SFTBY) (OTC: SFTBF) Arm processors, the Network World reports.
- Alibaba Cloud showcased its Yitian 710 processor design for use in its data centers in October 2021. It also announced the development of its proprietary servers.
- Yitian 710 is built on a 5nm manufacturing process on the Armv9 architecture and has 128 Arm cores, each with a top clock speed of 3.2GHz.
- Alibaba claimed the Yitian 710 beat the current state-of-the-art Arm server processor by 20% performance and 50% energy efficiency.
- Alibaba developed Panjiu by separating computing and storage to optimize general-purpose computing and AI computing servers.
- Alibaba also claims Panjiu is suitable for high-performance storage and various cloud-native workloads, like containerized applications.
- Experts saw Alibaba as more successful than other Chinese cloud providers at expanding its footprint and services beyond its home market of China while deriving the vast majority of its revenues from China and Hong Kong.
- Microsoft Azure delayed the preview of Arm-based instances versus Amazon.com Inc's (NASDAQ:AMZN) Amazon Web Services.
- AWS's Arm processor, Graviton, is a homemade chip developed by Amazon. On the other hand, Microsoft used the Altra processor from Ampere, led by former Intel Corp (NASDAQ:INTC) executive Renee James.
- Microsoft chased Arm instances to achieve up to 50% better price-performance than comparable x86-based virtual machines (VMs) for scale-out workloads.
