On November 3, at the 2022 Hangzhou Cloud Conference, Alibaba announced new progress in its self-developed computing power system. Its self-developed CPU Yitian 710 has been deployed on a large scale in the data center and serves Alibaba and many Internet technology companies in the form of cloud, becoming China's first self-developed CPU for large-scale applications on the cloud, achieving a major breakthrough in computing power. In the next two years, 20% of Alibaba Cloud's new computing power will use self-developed CPUs.
In 2009, Alibaba established Alibaba Cloud and invested in the research and development of the self-developed cloud operating system Feitian. This is the starting point for Alibaba to explore computing power and kicked off the prelude to China's self-developed cloud computing operating system. Feitian Operating System uses distributed architecture to replace traditional IOE architecture, which not only solves the computing power challenges brought about by Alibaba's rapid development of its business, but also makes computing power a public service that can be obtained online.
In the following five years, Alibaba Cloud has achieved a series of world-class breakthroughs. In 2013, Alibaba Cloud broke through the scale of 5,000 servers in a single cluster for the first time (Fei Tian 5K) worldwide, and took the lead in providing this capability to the outside world. Since then, Feitian Operating System has successfully supported extreme concurrency scenarios such as ticket purchase during Double 11 and 12306 Spring Festival travel rush for more than ten years.
As the scale of cloud computing applications continues to expand, Alibaba Cloud breaks the simple software innovation model and begins to conduct systematic innovation in the data center, defining the IT software and hardware system in the form of cloud. In terms of databases, Alibaba Cloud has further promoted the path of self-development after replacing traditional Oracle with open source MySQL. In 2017, Alibaba Cloud released its first cloud-native database, PolarDB, with computing power up to 1,000 cores and 6 times higher performance than open source MySQL. In recent years, Alibaba Cloud has successively entered the Gartner global database leader quadrant.
In 2017, Alibaba Cloud launched the first generation of Shenlong architecture, which improves the performance output of cloud computing through integrated software and hardware technology, achieving zero performance loss, and completely unleashes the computing power potential of cloud computing for the first time. Now this architecture has been upgraded to a new cloud infrastructure processor CIPU, which can replace CPU to manage and accelerate computing, storage and network resources. With the support of Feitian and CIPU, the global consistent read performance of PolarDB database has been increased by 10 times. Core technologies such as
have also accelerated the development of intelligent computing. In 2022, Alibaba Cloud launched the Feitian Intelligent Computing Platform, which is based on breakthroughs in core technologies such as underlying networks and computing, and can provide more efficient intelligent computing services to enterprises in the fields of artificial intelligence, life sciences, medical pharmaceuticals, and autonomous driving. Data shows that Feitian Intelligent Computing can increase the utilization rate of computing resources by more than 3 times, increase the efficiency of AI training by 11 times, and increase the efficiency of inference by 6 times. The continuous breakthroughs in
technology have promoted the rapid development of the cloud computing industry. Applications native to the cloud platform have continued to emerge. Comprehensive cloud access has gradually become the core strategy of enterprises, and the global cloud computing industry scale is also nearly one trillion US dollars.
If the first decade of cloud computing was the development of scale-driven software technology, then today cloud computing has entered a new stage. The computing power system that has been used after IOE is ushering in a new round of changes. Mainstream cloud manufacturers such as AWS and Alibaba Cloud have taken the lead in launching the research and development of new hardware and chips.
In 2018, Pingtou Ge was established, committed to building a chip product that integrates terminal and cloud. Alibaba's computing power system has been once again strengthened. The following year, Alibaba's first chip, Hanguang 800, was launched. This is a chip customized for AI scenes, which further improved the efficiency of AI scene computing and gradually applied image recognition, search recommendation and other scenarios.
At the same time, Alibaba is also challenging higher-difficulty computing power. In 2021, Alibaba released its first universal CPU chip, Yitian 710. This chip was born for the cloud and is a new product of the integration of the cloud computing industry and the traditional semiconductor industry, taking into account both performance and ease of use. At the 2022 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba Cloud announced that its self-developed CPU Yitian 710 has been widely used, and 20% of Alibaba Cloud's new computing power will use self-developed CPUs in the next two years. This is not only of great significance to China's chip industry, but also an important step in cloud computing to reshape the computing power system.
For the explosion of Internet of Things terminals, Alibaba focuses on the development of RISC-V architecture processors. This architecture is considered to be the third path of China's chip industry after ARM and x86 architectures.At present, Pingtouge has launched a variety of products such as the high-performance RISC-V processor, Black Iron 910, and has led 11 important technical directions, becoming a global leader in the development of RISC-V technology and ecosystem.
Since the birth of the world's first electronic computer, ENIAC, the carrier of computing power has undergone the evolution from mainframes, minicomputers, PCs, mobile terminals and cloud computing. However, the ultimate form of computing power is far from here, and technology companies are still challenging new technologies. For the future, Alibaba has made a series of breakthroughs in the fields of integrated storage and computing chips, quantum computing, etc. In 2022, based on the new superconducting quantum bit fluxonium, the DAMO Quantum Laboratory successfully designed and manufactured a two-bit quantum chip, achieving a single-bit manipulation accuracy of 99.97%, and a two-bit iSWAP gate manipulation accuracy of up to 99.72%, achieving the best level of such bits in the world.
