Recently, there have been reports that Chinese chipmaker Hygon is about to launch the C86-5G processor, although Hygon does not often appear in the list of the best CPUs in gaming or consumer grades, but as an important fabless semiconductor company in China, it has been deeply involved in the field of server chips for a long time. From the first generation of products developed based on AMD's authorized technology to the road of independent innovation, Hygon has taken a solid and powerful step at every step.
As Hygon's flagship product, C86-5G is full of highlights. It has a whopping 128 cores and a staggering 512 threads with four-thread (SMT4) technology. This design is not the first of its kind in Hygon, Intel's Xeon Phi (Knights Landing) and IBM's Power8 processors have similar architecture applications, but Hygon has integrated it into its own products, which undoubtedly enhances the ability of C86-5G in multi-threaded processing tasks, providing a strong power for servers to cope with complex computing and large-scale data processing.
In terms of memory support, the C86-5G has been upgraded from the C86-4G's 12-channel DDR5-4800 to a 16-channel DDR5-5600. This upgrade not only increases the memory bandwidth, but also significantly increases the memory capacity limit. Even with a regular 64GB DDR5 memory module, the C86-5G can easily be equipped with up to 1TB of memory, meeting the needs of enterprise-class big data storage and fast read and write. In addition, it also supports the AVX-512 instruction set, which further accelerates the computing speed of the chip in multimedia processing, scientific computing and other fields, and significantly improves the performance of the server under related workloads.
Figure: Hygon C86-5G: a new breakthrough in China's chip industry
In terms of connectivity, the C86-5G closely follows the cutting-edge standards and supports Compute Express Link 2.0 (CXL 2.0). Although the number of PCIe 5.0 lanes has not yet been announced, CXL2.0 technology provides higher efficiency and lower latency in connecting to other computing devices and high-speed storage, enabling better construction of high-speed, collaborative computing systems, and is in the same competitive echelon as AMD's EPYC 9005 and Intel's 5th Gen Xeon in terms of interconnection standards.
At the microarchitecture level, C86-5G continues the "new self-developed microarchitecture" adopted by Hygon from C86-4G, and has been upgraded again. According to Hygon, this increases the number of instructions per cycle (IPC) of the C86-5G by more than 17%, which means that the chip can process more instructions in the same time, and the performance is significantly optimized. However, since the details of the microarchitecture have not yet been disclosed, there is curiosity and anticipation for the innovation of its internal design.
Judging from the power consumption data, although the official has not disclosed the exact power consumption value of the C86-5G processor, it is recalled that Hygon's past products, such as C86 3185, have a thermal design power consumption of 95W, and the maximum power consumption in actual operation is 70W; The C86 3350 typically consumes 65W. Considering that C86-5G has up to 128 cores and many performance improvement features, its power consumption is expected to be at a high level, but with the optimization of the new architecture and the improvement of the process technology (although the specific process has not been disclosed at present), Hygon may also have achieved certain results in balancing performance and power consumption, and is expected to control the power consumption in a relatively reasonable range while ensuring powerful computing power, so as to meet the energy consumption requirements of large-scale application scenarios such as data centers.
From the perspective of Hygon's product development history, C86-5G is the result of its continuous improvement. The early products have gone through many iterations and upgrades from reference to gradual independent design. Today's C86-5G is optimized in terms of the number of cores, memory support, instruction set, and microarchitecture, which reflects the improvement of Hygon's technical strength. While it's hard to say for sure that it can compete with AMD and Intel's top performers at this time, the C86-5G is already very competitive in terms of features.
In the context of global scientific and technological competition and trade frictions, Hygon's development is of great significance. China has always been committed to achieving technological self-sufficiency, and companies like Hygon have become a key force.
