Alibaba Group releases AI/IoT RISC-V chip

off wave surfer · July 31, 2019

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Alibaba Group’s chip subsidiary, Pingtouge Semiconductor, has announced a RISC-V based processor, the Xuantie 910, that will be used to target infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI), 5G, and internet of things (IoT) as well as autonomous vehicles.

The processor is said to achieve 7.1 Coremark/MHz at a frequency of 2.5GHz on a 12nm process node, which would make it 40% more powerful than any RISC-V processor produced to date.

40% more powerful than any other RISC-V chip is an impressive gain, it'll be interesting to see how the rest of the industry reacts to this.

However, I doubt the chip will make it out of China as from the article it sounds like the chip is intended solely for the Chinese market.

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This is a significant move as it will enable local companies to access locally developed processor architectures at a time when accessing U.S. technology is increasingly difficult.

From the rest of the article it sounds like there's been some serious effort put into the design regarding instruction pipelines and bundling of instruction sets. Not to mention the fact that they're confident enough to release the relevant code as open-source on GitHub.

Personally, I'm not going to comment on the availability of U.S. technology in China.

Aside from that I'm pretty excited about the future of RISC-V chips, if enough companies get behind it then this could be the norm for SoCs. Although I doubt RISC-V will ever push Intel/AMD etc out of the high-end or mainstream consumer market.

Source: http://www.newelectronics.co.uk/electronics-news/alibaba-unveils16-core-risc-v-chip/217877/