Eastern and Western arithmetic has spawned a revolution in computing power, "core infrastructure" and the "XPU" behind it

Jiwei network news, since the launch of the "East Number West Calculation" project, "East Number West Calculation" has become a high-frequency hot word, and behind it will be a "computing revolution".

At the beginning of 2022, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Central Cyberspace Administration, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the National Energy Administration jointly issued a document agreeing to start the construction of national computing power hub nodes in beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, yangtze river delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and planning 10 national data center clusters in the initial stage. The national integrated big data center system completed the overall layout design, and the "East Number West Calculation" was officially launched.

Enter a new era of hash rates

In recent years, with the acceleration of digital transformation and upgrading in various industries, the total amount of data in the whole society has exploded. At present, most of the mainland data centers are distributed in the eastern region, and the resources such as land and energy are becoming increasingly tight. The abundant resources in the western region have the potential to develop data centers and undertake the demand for computing power in the east.

Through the construction of a new computing power network system integrating data centers, cloud computing and big data, "East Digital West Computing" will guide the eastern computing power demand to the west in an orderly manner, optimize the layout of data center construction, and promote the coordinated linkage between the east and the west.

In the long run, the official launch of the Eastern And Western Computing means that China has entered a new era of computing power. Up to now, the scale of continental data centers has reached 5 million standard racks. With the comprehensive and continuous penetration of digital technology into all fields of economy and society, the demand for computing power in the whole society is still very urgent.

Previously, the National Development and Reform Commission said that the implementation of the East And West Calculation Project is conducive to improving the overall level of the country's computing power. Through the construction of a nationally integrated data center layout, the scale of computing power facilities will be expanded, the efficiency of computing power use will be improved, and the large-scale and intensive development of computing power will be realized nationwide.

Because the east number is mainly to strengthen the construction of the western data center, to alleviate the pressure on the eastern data center. In this process, the chip is an indispensable basic support link.

The "number" in "East Counting West" refers to the data, and "counting" refers to the computing power, that is, the ability to process the data. The data center can be divided into three elements: "computing", "storage" and "network". Therefore, the chips required for these three core functions have become the focus of industry attention under the strategy of "East Counting and West Counting". In this context, the "domestic core" is expected to usher in a new round of demand growth.

In February this year, China Mobile released PC server collection data, Huawei Kunpeng chip servers accounted for 16.55%, Haiguang chip servers accounted for 10.49%. Recently, China Telecom 2022-2023 server centralized procurement project bid opening, this collection is so far the three major domestic operators one of the largest server collection project, domestic CPU accounted for 27%.

According to many views, Dongshu Xisuan will focus on building large-scale data center clusters and computing power networks, and directly pull the huge demand for heterogeneous acceleration chips in data centers such as server chips, AI chips, DPUs, and GPUs.

"XPU" builds a large computing power "core infrastructure"

Hash rate is further subdivided and can be divided into three different types.

The first is called basic computing power, which is the computing power provided by the cpu chip-based server, which is mainly used for basic general-purpose computing. Cloud computing, edge computing, etc., which we often mention, belong to the basic computing power.

The second is called intelligent computing power, which is the computing power provided by the accelerated computing platform based on AI chips such as GPUs, FPGAs, AND ICs, which is mainly used for artificial intelligence training and inference calculations, such as speech, image and video processing.

The third is called supercomputing power, which is the computing power provided by supercomputers, which is mainly used for calculations in cutting-edge scientific fields, such as planetary simulations, drug molecular design, genetic analysis, and so on.

"Counting the East and counting the West" is an important step in implementing the national strategy for the digital economy. From the generation of data to the transmission, calculation and processing of data, it is inseparable from the computing chip. Due to the increase in data processing volume and reverse stimulation of data processing speed, the demand for high-performance computing chips such as CPUs and GPUs is expected to continue to increase.

From the physical structure point of view, GPUs and CPUs are similar, including control units, storage units and computing units, but CPUs are good at logic control and serial computing, while GPUs have more ALU, suitable for parallel processing of large-scale data, adapting to the data processing needs of algorithms such as deep learning. According to IDC, GPUs account for 91.9%, NGUs account for 6.3%, ASICs and FPGAs for 0.3% in 2021.

According to IDC data, the size of China's GPU market will be 2.6 billion US dollars in 2020 and will reach 6.4 billion US dollars in 2024, with a compound growth rate of 30%. Driven by market demand, hot money is also rapidly pouring into the GPU industry, boosting the further rapid development of mainland GPU companies.

In the first three months of this year alone, the mainland GPU track has completed several rounds of large-scale financing, and Lisuan Technology has completed hundreds of millions of yuan of angel round financing for the research and development of Tiantu GPU chips; GPU manufacturer Core Pupil Semiconductor completed the Pre-A round of financing; GPU company Shenliu Micro Intelligence completed nearly 100 million yuan of PreA round of financing.

In the subdivision of the basic software and IDC that is further speculated in the East, The DPU is widely optimistic because of its characteristics.

DPU is defined as a data processor, the core is through the coprocessor to assist the master CPU to process network, storage and computing functions, for high-bandwidth, low-latency, data-intensive computing scenarios to provide a computing engine, is expected to become the third largest computing pillar chip after the data center scenario relay CPU and GPU.

At present, the domestic DPU industry has begun to emerge a number of local start-ups, and the implementation of the East Number West Calculation Project will also have a good role in promoting the entire DPU industry. In the face of the era of hashrate growth, mainland DPU companies have also opened the "financing fever", and in March this year, Core Qiyuan received more than 100 million yuan of strategic investment for the research and development of next-generation DPU products. Throughout the past year, Zhongke Yishu, Dayu Zhixin, Nebulas Zhilian, Andyx Technology, etc. have all obtained financing to promote the further growth of enterprises.

Wan Xinheng, deputy to the National People's Congress and deputy secretary of the party group and deputy director of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region Department of Industry and Information Technology, pointed out that "counting the east and counting the west" is followed by "core cloud integration." The most direct role of the DPU and other processing core cloud fusion solutions is to act as the offload engine of the CPU, take over the infrastructure layer services such as network virtualization and hardware resource pooling, thereby releasing valuable CPU resources to run the upper layer applications, realizing the separation of data-centric business and infrastructure operations, thereby reducing the dependence of network data on the data center, alleviating the processing needs of the eastern application end for network data, allowing the data center to truly return to data computing and solving the imbalance between supply and demand. (Proofreading/Sinonok)