Chinese server CPU beats Microsoft, Google and AWS rivals to take the performance crown – Alibaba’s Yitian 710 is the fastest server CPU, but is based on Arm rather than RISC and x86 will likely be the overall speed champion
Alibaba Cloud’s Yitian 710 processor is today’s most efficient Arm-based server processor for database tasks in hyperscale cloud environments, according to new research.
A recent study published in the Transactions on cloud computing magazine of IEEE found that the 128-core processor, developed in 2021, not only outpaces rival Arm-based chips, but also reportedly runs laps around Intel’s Xeon Platinum (Sapphire Rapids) processor when it comes to specific database tasks in the cloud.
This finding comes from a research article titled “Are Arm Cloud servers ready for database workloads? An experimental study“, produced by Research Assistant Professor Dumitrel Loghin from the National University of Singapore’s School of Computing. The study, conducted on eight cloud servers, tested the performance of five Arm-powered server CPUs, including the Yitian 710, and contrasted them that of Intel. x86 Xeon Platinum 8488C processor (launched in 2023).
Shows great potential
Major players such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are no strangers to 64-bit Arm CPUs, having introduced their own versions of virtual machines running on these servers. AWS’s Graviton2 and Graviton3, Alibaba’s Yitian 710, Huawei’s Kunpeng 920 and Ampere Altra CPUs used by Azure and GCP are all included in the analysis.
Alibaba’s Yitian 710 was ahead of its rivals in synthetic Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks and the study concluded that, alongside AWS’s Graviton3, they are true rivals to Intel’s Xeon CPUs, with equal or even superior results for in-memory workloads. That said, Arm-based servers struggled to match Xeon for Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), Machine Learning inference, and blockchain tasks. The slowdown was mainly due to unoptimized software, lower clock frequency and sub-par performance at the core level.
You can view the full set of benchmarks in The register‘s report, which also notes that the Yitian 710 “has some inherent advantages: it uses a newer version of the Arm ISA and fast DDR5 RAM that some competing CPUs can’t use.”
The report concludes that while “ARM servers spend twice as much time on Linux kernel system calls compared to Xeon servers,” they “show great potential. Given their lower cloud computing price, ARM servers could be the ideal choice if performance is not critical.”