Hygon Lays Out Ground-Breaking Plans For China’s Domestic Tech Market: Next-Gen C86 Chips With +15% IPC, SMT4 & Tackle Intel Xeon 6

China's premier chipmaker, Hygon, has disclosed its plans for six chips designed for the domestic tech market, including the next-gen C86 CPU.

Hygon's Next-Gen C86 CPUs To Tackle Intel's Latest Xeon, Bringing a Double-Digit IPC Boost, SMT4 Support & AVX512 Instructions

Hygon, based in Beijing, China, has been hard at work producing high-quality chips for the domestic markets. Their previous C86 solutions, designed in collaboration with AMD, have seen major interest by domestic players, and now, the next-generation C86 processor development is underway.

In its latest report, Hygon has shared plans to develop six chips that will be offered to domestic audiences in China. The leading chip in the lineup is the next-gen C86 CPU, designed for general-purpose computing. Currently, China offers its C86-4G series for mainstream and enterprise audiences. The next-gen C86-5G series aims to be bolder.

Starting with the core highlights, the next-gen Hygon C86 series will feature a brand new architecture, offering an IPC uplift greater than 15%. The company has previously highlighted a 17% IPC uplift for the same series. The chip will also feature STM4 multi-threading support, which means that each CPU core can handle four concurrent threads, expanding its enterprise and server capabilities. There are also some major updates on the instruction support with AVX512 being added for enhanced vector compute, and AI acceleration from INT8 and BF16 is also a major selling point.

• New microarchitecture, IPC improved by 15%+
• Supports SMT4 multi-threading to meet high-concurrency business needs.
• Compatible with the AVX512 instruction set, enhanced vector computing power.
• New AI acceleration instructions, such as INT8 and BF16, have been added.

In terms of performance, Hygon is claiming that its next-gen C86 chips will rival Intel's Xeon 6 lineup. That in itself is very promising as it will bring the Chinese domestic markets on par with the big players.

But Hygon isn't stopping at CPUs; they have a whole ecosystem of chips in development. Next is a new GPU accelerator, "DCU," which is designed with AI training and compute in mind. This chip will feature a full-precision GPGPU architecture with support for ultra-high-speed inter-chip interconnect. Hygon will be leveraging the latest HBM memory technologies while also offering FP64/FP16/BF16 support. It is stated that the chip will be comparable to NVIDIA's A100 based on the Ampere architecture.

• Full-precision GPGPU architecture
• Supports FP64/PF16/BF16 multi-precision calculation
• Ultra-high-speed inter-chip interconnect
• Paired with high-speed HBM memory

The next four chips include a PCIe 5.0 Switch, a Scale-Up Interconnect Switch, a 400G Network Interface chip, and a ScaleFabric 400/800G switch. These will be crucial for Hygon to develop its own AI & high-performance Enterprise ecosystem. The details of these chips are listed below:

Hygon PCIe 5.0 Switch:

• High-Speed I/O
• Targets Broadcom's high-end PCIe switching chips.
• 104 lanes

Scale-Up Interconnect Switch:

• Comparable to NVLINK + NVSwitch
• Ultra high-speed interconnect for multiple GPUs/CPUs

ScaleFabric 400G Network Interface Chip:

• 400Gb/s port speed, native RDMA protocol
• Credit-based flow control + lossless LLR characteristics
• Network card communication latency is 0.93µs, maximum QP is 256K.
• Plug and play, supports smooth evolution to 800G
• Comparable to NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR Network AICs.

ScaleFabric 400/800G Switch:

• 400/800Gb/s port speed, native RDMA
• 80*400Gb/s switching port density, 64Tb switching capacity
• 260ns switching latency, millisecond-level link failure switching
• Self-developed 112G high-speed SerDes IP, leading in signal driving capabilities.
• Comparable to NVIDIA InfiniBand NDR Switches

Hygon is expected to begin producing products of these chips between 2026 and 2027, so expect to see them in action in the coming years.

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