Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

For code workers, if there is a lack of inspiration, there will always be something to gain from walking around the extreme community. In the latest recommendation column of the Jishu community, the author found that the amount of reading and downloading of the white paper of the East and West calculation facilities are very high. As a national computing project, the future development of eastern math and western arithmetic has attracted much attention.

At the beginning of this year, the National Development and Reform Commission, together with various departments, announced that it had agreed to the construction of the project, including the construction of national computing hub nodes in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Chengdu, Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou and Ningxia, and planned 10 national data center clusters, including Zhangjiakou Cluster.

Data center is the data center and computing power carrier that promotes the development of new generation digital technology, such as 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and so on, and promotes the growth of digital economy. For the data center, the core component, the chip, can be described as the most critical component.

As an important part of the national digital economy development strategy, the integrated, green and intelligent development of the data center also puts forward many requirements for the chip. Many readers are more concerned about the development of chips driven by the East-West Project.

With the implementation of this large-scale computing project, the market development of high-power and high-performance chips has been promoted. In the complex changes in the international situation, for domestic chip manufacturers, how to break through and win the market?

The core demand of the new data center is an important "foundation" of the digital economy, and the data center plays an important role in the economic and social development. At the same time, the overall opening of the digital economy and the demand for green and sustainable development have put forward newer and higher requirements for the data center. A number of policy documents, including the "three-year Action Plan for the Development of the New data Center (2021-2023)" and "the 14th five-year Plan for the Development of the Information and Communication Industry", point out that the new data center should achieve high-quality development from the four aspects of high technology, high computing power, high energy efficiency and high security. Under the requirements and guidance of the policy, the data center has ushered in innovation, and there is a new demand for chips.

The East and West calculation project is an important new computing infrastructure, and chips are the foundation in the process of digital transformation of thousands of banks and industries. The development of digital economy is inseparable from the drive of data, which involves many sensitive data of government, finance, communications and other industries. The primary requirement of the underlying computing facilities for CPU is information security.

The second is the need for high performance. The data center can centrally manage the data, that is, the exchange, calculation, storage and so on. Computing is the core function of the data center. The improvement of chip performance not only brings intelligent and efficient services, but also helps the green development of data centers.

According to the forward-looking Industrial Research Institute, the energy consumption of the data center mainly includes IT equipment, refrigeration system, power supply and distribution system, lighting system and other facilities. The power consumption generated by IT equipment systems composed of servers, storage and network communication devices accounts for about 45% of the total power consumption of the data center, of which the server system accounts for about 50%, the storage system accounts for about 35%, the network communication equipment accounts for about 15%, and the power consumption generated by the air conditioning system accounts for about 40% of the total power consumption of the data center. We can see that the upgrade of the IT equipment server system in the data center is of great significance to the low-carbon development of the data center. The optimization of server performance and power consumption means the reduction of unit energy consumption.

Finally, it is the integration with other technologies. For example, the integration with cryptography technology can ensure the security and privacy of data. With the surge of data center traffic, the complexity and scope of security issues have increased. The traditional calculation of encryption and decryption with software consumes a lot of CPU. By connecting the security technology with dedicated module hardware or DPU, the algorithms previously used in CPU can be unloaded to the dedicated engine, which can release CPU memory and improve encryption and decryption performance at the same time.

The main core requirements of these new data centers, such as high performance and easy integration, also outline the general direction of high-performance chips for the development of domestic chip manufacturers. Combined with their own strengths, chip manufacturers need to seek a breakthrough in the raging development of the data center.

The road to breakthrough in the arena with the integrated development of the data center, the management of data and resources has become complex. This also puts forward requirements for the data processing capacity of the chip: larger bandwidth and larger storage.

The integration and transmission of data and distributed computing are also indispensable ways. In the complex international situation, the external supply environment is changeable. For domestic chip manufacturers, in order to achieve the chip level with higher technical standards abroad, on the one hand, domestic chip manufacturers need to make efforts in the direction of chip underlying architecture innovation, process technology and so on. With the existing instruction set architecture, overseas giants have more advantages. In terms of architecture design, domestic chip manufacturers still have room for upgrading and growth. Through the innovation of the underlying architecture and the iteration of the manufacturing process, the computational efficiency is improved by an order of magnitude.

Some chip makers have waded down this path. The DPU of a domestic chip manufacturer has been taped out. The traditional data center takes CPU as the core architecture, and the emergence of DPU meets the needs of data center computing and data processing with more specialized performance. With the in-depth integration and development of software and hardware architecture, DPU will become the next generation of core computing unit in the data center.

Of course, the reality is that not all chip manufacturers can complete the chip architecture design and research and development independently. IP or products and services that apply mature design modules are also the choice of many enterprises. For example, the choice of third-party IP enterprise Amou technology, Ruicheng micro, and so on. The IP design and self-development products provided by Amou Technology can customize high-performance chips and provide services for many chip manufacturers. High-performance chips based on Arm architecture can be seen from mobile phones, PC and even Fuyue, the world's second-largest supercomputer. With the potential energy of these third-party manufacturers, domestic chip manufacturers can also iterate and innovate faster.

In addition to the data center processors, the ideas of chip manufacturers can also be pre-loaded into the major edge devices before the data flows into the data center, and force on all kinds of edge processors. Manufacturers can consider improving the CPU performance of edge devices and reducing the power consumption of integrated SOC chips to improve the computing power of edge devices as a whole and reduce the pressure of data processing in the data center. For example, in some high-power scenarios, through highly integrated and low-power design, various interfaces are integrated into a single chip, customized algorithms to reduce power consumption; a general-purpose processor is designed as a special device to provide computing services for some scenarios, improve the computing power of edge devices, and so on.

For chip manufacturers, we also need to pay attention to the coordination between the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. The overall industrial chain of the chip industry is lengthy and covers a wide range of categories. Many domestic chip manufacturers are good at chip design, but lack of capacity. The development of high-performance chip industry needs the coordination of upstream and downstream of the industrial chain. Manufacturers can choose to promote the development of ecological links such as software and hardware, solutions, tool chains and industry standards through strategic cooperation, product technical support, collaborative projects and other forms, and finally achieve their own iteration.

These breakthrough paths are discussed on paper and look light. For the development of domestic chips, they all exist like mountains and are difficult to climb. In the semiconductor industry, once the market pattern is shaped, it is almost difficult to break. The development of each industrial breakthrough and difficulty requires the accumulation of a lot of resources and innovation. The breakthrough channel of the domestic chip is long. Faced with the deployment of the future computing network, there are also many problems to be solved.

With the completion of the deployment of data center nodes, the construction of computing network is also in progress. China computer Network Intelligent Computing Network has been launched. The hub nodes of East and West calculation, and the intelligence centers and super computing centers of various places will be merged into the computing network one after another in the future, forming a convenient network with access to computing power at any time.

For the data center, the future distributed data center nodes will be connected by the computing network to allocate and schedule computing tasks as a whole to maximize the value of computing. In the face of complex and changeable data transmission and scheduling across nodes, domestic chip manufacturers still need to solve these problems.

Communication and matching between supply and demand. In the face of different sizes of data centers and multi-functional chips, the demand information of both sides is relatively vague, chip manufacturers need to solve the problem of insufficient communication with the data center, and finally achieve matching needs and services.

The scheduling and flow of data across data center nodes have certain requirements for the performance of the chip, such as the improvement of compression and decompression ability. Huge amounts of data need to be compressed before transmission and decompressed before storage, and chip manufacturers need to improve the lossless compression technology of the chip.

General edge computing product solution. Edge computing has many scenarios, many devices, and a large demand, which requires high performance and power consumption of CPU. For example, in the face of high computing power scenarios, such as industrial Internet, telemedicine, intelligent cars and so on, chip manufacturers need to provide more general edge computing product solutions. Improve the adaptability and ease of use of edge device servers to facilitate end-to-end automated deployment.

The East-West Project will bring fluctuations to the high-performance chip market, but it will not lead to capacity blowout development. More level is the improvement of the performance of the chip itself, that is, optimization from both algorithm and hardware at the same time. Chip manufacturers need to improve their ability to cooperate with software and hardware.

Around the data center, the East and West calculation project and the construction of integrated computing network, the construction of these computing facilities brings opportunities as well as challenges, leaving a tight time for domestic chip manufacturers to break through. This is a comprehensive test for chip manufacturers. It is not only necessary to quickly launch and serve the project of calculating the number of the East and the West, but also need to stay and hand in the papers in this arena. In this battle, there is no breathing room. In the complex and changeable chip market, various teams have assembled and started a sprint toward the blueprint depicted in the heart.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: brain Polar body (ID:unity007), by Yan Liang

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