Alibaba Cloud's Yitian 710 processor is the most efficient Arm-based server processor for database tasks in hyperscale cloud environments today, new research claims.
A recent study published in the Transactions in cloud computing IEEE Magazine found that the 128-core processor, developed in 2021, not only outperforms rival Arm-based chips, but reportedly circles around the Intel Xeon Platinum (Sapphire Rapids) processor when These are cloud database-specific tasks.
This finding comes from a research paper titled “Are Arm Cloud servers ready for database workloads? An experimental study“, produced by Research Assistant Professor Dumitrel Loghin of 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 compared them to Intel's x86 Xeon Platinum 8488C processor (released in 2023).
Showing great potential
Key players like 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. The Graviton2 and Graviton3 CPUs from AWS, Yitian 710 from Alibaba, Kunpeng 920 from Huawei, and Ampere Altra used by Azure and GCP were included in the analysis.
Alibaba's Yitian 710 was ahead of its rivals in the Dhrystone and Whetstone synthetic benchmarks and the study concluded that, along with AWS's Graviton3, they are true rivals to Intel's Xeon CPUs, showing equal or even superior results for loads. working memory. That said, for online analytical processing (OLAP), machine learning inference, and blockchain tasks, Arm-based servers struggled to match Xeon. The lag was mainly attributed to unoptimized software, lower clock frequency, and lower core-level performance.
You can view the full set of benchmarks at RegisterThe report, which also notes that the Yitian 710 “has some inherent advantages: it uses a newer version of the Arm ISA and fast DDR5 RAM that some rival CPUs can't use.”
The report concludes that while “ARM servers spend 2x more 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 when performance is not critical.”
