Xuantie 910 16-core: alibaba presents a powerful processor

When Pingtou Ge (Brother Pingtou) Semiconductor Co. was founded by Alibaba in September 2018, the vision was to create innovative chips for production. The company had once been known as Zhongtianwei, a chip company, which was acquired by Alibaba in April last year along with Aha's team.

Alibaba Introduces Powerful 16-Core XuanTie 910 Processor

On July 25, it was announced that Brother Pingtou had released the 16-core RISC-V XuanTie 910 (Black Iron 910) processor. The company has reported that the processor will be integrated into high-performance equipment for 5G connections, AI, and autonomous driving applications. There are conflicting reports that the processor is also known as the T-Head, although its name means Black Iron. There has been no firm release date or price yet.

Open source technologies are being regularly adopted in China, and the XuanTie 910 is being offered to developers with the encouragement to use Berkeley-based open source ISA with very few intellectual property restrictions.

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The processor can supply 7.1 Coremark / MHz with a main frequency reaching 2.5 GHz, which is 40% higher than that of the current best RISC-V processor on the market. There were two major technological advances for this processor, they claim: instruction processing at significantly higher levels than ever, and the first processor to achieve 2 memory processes per cycle.

Caixian Global has reported that the chip could cut related chip production costs by 50%, and Alibaba told the publication that they would be releasing portions of the XuanTie 910 code on GitHub.

There are currently few details about the XuanTie 910 processor, but China could use the RISC-V to offer competition to semiconductor companies like ARM, as well as bypass US sanctions against Chinese companies like Huawei.

Source cnx-software