IDC: in the first half of the year, China's server market shipped 1.706 million units, an increase of 8.9% year on year

Mention Alibaba, probably most people will think of Taobao, Alipay and other Internet and even financial services. Indeed, Ali's business and investment companies are Internet companies, and they are the existence of apps that can be seen in mobile phones. However, I would say that Ali is also a semiconductor company, which most people may not believe. Domestic super chip was born

A few days ago, the media broke the news that Ali will start to study the chip business from 2019, and give it to its chip company "Ganghead Brother", which was established in 2018, to specific research and development. At present, the chip has been successfully streamed and will be released today.

Coincidentally, at the Ali Cloud Conference on October 19, Alibaba Gang head brother also officially released a self-developed chip, named Yitian 710, which is very martial arts taste, which is also very in line with Ali's corporate culture. At the conference, the person in charge of Pingtou elder elder said that Yitian 710 is the strongest ARM server chip in China and even in the world, the performance exceeds the current industry benchmark by about 20%, and the energy efficiency ratio is even increased by more than 50%, mainly used in Ali's cloud computing data center in the future, whether the specific future is sold out is not clear. According to IDC's "Second Quarter of 2021 China Server Market Tracking Report", in the first half of 2021, China's server market shipments were 1.706 million units, an increase of 8.9%; The market size was $10.81 billion, up 12.1% year on year. Among them, the X86 server market shipments were 1.672 million units, an increase of 8.0%; The market size was $10.49 billion, up 12.6% year on year.

In the first half of 2021, China's overall server market maintained steady growth in shipments and vendor sales, and thanks to the success of the epidemic control, China's economy will experience a strong recovery in 2021, with most enterprises showing strong demand for server procurement based on business needs, despite the increasingly significant shortage caused by the global supply chain. Some of the demand could not be fulfilled, but the Chinese server market still maintained double-digit positive growth in terms of vendor sales. In addition to Internet companies, the growth of traditional industries is also the main driving force for market growth in the first half of 2021, with finance, manufacturing, services, medical care and energy all showing more than 20% year-on-year growth, of which financial performance is particularly outstanding, driven by smart financial construction, the strong demand for financial institutions from the fourth quarter of 2020 continued to the first half of this year.

From the server sub-market, accelerated computing servers for artificial intelligence application scenarios are the core driving force for the growth of China's server market. The application of artificial intelligence is deepening, from fragmentation to deep integration, from a single point of application to a diversified application scenario, especially in finance, manufacturing, energy and public utilities and other industries. In the first half of 2021, China's accelerated computing server market reached $2.4 billion, an increase of 85.1%, of which GPU servers accounted for about 90% of the entire accelerated computing server market. In addition, the market for edge computing servers deployed in edge locations will also see rapid growth. According to IDC's definition of generalized edge computing, servers currently deployed at the edge account for more than 10% of the overall server market, of which more than 95% still use general-purpose servers. With the continuous refinement of edge applications, in order to cope with more complex deployment environments, the edge custom server and microserver market is expected to usher in rapid growth in the next few years.

In the first half of 2021, from the perspective of vendor sales, the top five vendors in China's server market are Inspur & Inspur Business Machines, H3C, Huawei, Dell and Lenovo. From the perspective of industry sales, the Internet of the top five industries showed a growth rate of 16.4%, slightly higher than the average market growth rate, government and telecommunications showed negative growth, finance and services maintained a growth rate of more than 20%, significantly higher than the average market growth rate.

IDC predicts that China's overall server market in the next five years compound growth rate will reach 12.7%, 2025 China's overall server market size is expected to reach 42.47 billion US dollars, of which X86 server market will reach 13.0% compound growth rate in the next five years. The X86 server market is expected to reach $41.42 billion by 2025.

IDC China Enterprise Research Department research manager Index said that with the rebound of the Chinese economy, in the first half of 2021, industry user demand has welcomed a strong recovery, in the case of some demand because of the shortage of upstream parts can not be fulfilled, the Chinese server market still maintains double-digit growth, while the proportion of the global server market continues to increase. From the perspective of the overall data center development trend, computing density and energy consumption is the focus of general concern, the development of new technologies on the infrastructure requirements are getting higher and higher, artificial intelligence, big data, 5G and other technologies bring the demand for high concurrency data processing, will promote the data center rack density, at the same time, "carbon peak" and "carbon neutral" has become a national strategy. Energy saving, green and low-carbon will become the requirements of the country and enterprises for data centers in the future, and energy saving and cost reduction are also the future development direction of data centers.

According to public information, the Itin 710 uses a 5nm process, and it is not clear whether it is manufactured by Samsung or TSMC. A single chip has up to 60 billion transistors, compared with 57 billion crystals in the just-released Apple M1 Max chip. In terms of chip architecture, the E-Tian 710 is based on the latest ARM v9 architecture, with 128 core cpus and a maximum frequency of 3.2GHz. In addition, the Itian 710 supports up to 8 channels of DDR5 memory and 96 PCIe5.0, which can fully meet the needs of relevant enterprise users. In the words of Zhang Jianfeng, president of Ali Cloud Intelligence and president of Ali Damo Institute, the research and development of Yitian 710 is based on the business strategy of "one cloud with multiple cores" and "doing deep foundation" of Ali Cloud, hoping to meet the diverse computing needs of customers. At present, this chip is mainly for Ali Cloud's own use, the future will not consider external sales for the time being, and Ali will continue to maintain close cooperation with Intel, ARM, NVIDIA and other partners, follow-up development of more chips, to provide customers with more options Zhang Jianfeng finally said that Gangtou Brother has spent 3 years of efforts to research and development, released the open source version of RISC-V series processors, And open the related series of tools and system software. They are four mass-produced processor IP, such as E902, E906, C906, C910, etc. Developers can realize open source EDA projects through the source code of Xuentie, and enrich the software application ecology. Ali's core building road has begun to pay off

From the release of this cloud conference today, I believe that I have refreshed a lot of people's impressions of Ali. After all, whether it is for Alibaba, or Ma Yun himself, there are very few and semiconductor chip hanging relationship, in fact, Ali has been laid out the semiconductor industry a long time ago, from the earliest Damo court, to the back of the flat head brother, Ali seems to have been and the semiconductor industry is not separated. However, most of Ali's semiconductor products are preferred for internal use in the company, and ordinary consumer users rarely have access to Ali's chips. However, this does not mean that the chips manufactured by Ali do not have technical content, take the just-released Yitian 710, whether it is 60 billion transistors or 5nm process, it is a very strong presence in the entire industry. You know, once we were proud of Hisilicon Semiconductor, its strongest server chip Kunpeng 920 can not be compared with Yitian 710, and even killed by seconds. Of course, as a product of the 7nm era, Kunpeng 920 is naturally inferior to the 5nm Yitian 710. At present, Huawei's difficulties are well known, and its server chips have not been updated for a long time. Fortunately, our domestic semiconductor people have now handed over the satisfactory answer of the Yitian 710, which is indeed very proud, and if the Flathehead brother can always adhere to independent research and development, it may also become the next Huawei Hisilis, let us bless them together.