News Alibaba Unveils Open Source RISC-V CPU Amid US-China Trade War

[Admin]

Alibaba announced its first-ever RISC-V-based processor of its on design, Xuantie 910. It plans to outsource production of the chip to local Chinese firms.

Alibaba Unveils Open Source RISC-V CPU Amid US-China Trade War : Read more

 

[bit_user]

Lucian, you're slipping! Get it together, man. You're one of my favorite tech reporters.

Alibaba Unveils Open Source RISC-V CPU

I'm sure that's not what they announced, but the Nikkei article doesn't get it exactly right, either. Certainly, their CPU design is a proprietary, closed-source implementation of the open-source RISC-V ISA. Massive difference.

The companies that have already licensed the Armv8 ISA from Arm should also be able to design their own processors on top of the ISA for a long time,

No, it shouldn't be a blanket-license. I'm pretty sure the license is tied to a specific silicon implementation.

However, you also need support and software packages from ARM. For instance firmware, microcode, device drivers, GPU libraries, etc. These services were abrupt cut off, when the US first banned US businesses from working with them. Then, it got backed off to 90 day sunset (though I don't know if that's still where it stands). But, that surely got Huawei's attention!

RISC-V offers other significant advantages over Arm

And first among these should be no royalty payments!

Nvidia has also started to design its own RISC-V microcontroller for GeForce graphics cards,

Or, in a more recent (and interesting) project:

Deep Dive: Nvidia Inference Research Chip Scales to 32 Chiplets

Nvidia has presented its RC 18 research chip for inference acceleration. The small 16nm chip with RISC-V core scales to 32 units in a package, delivering over 100 TOPS at over 100W.

www.tomshardware.com

I remembered reading it, but it's also the 3rd hit I get, when searching the site for RISC-V!

 

[bit_user]

BTW, some details are here: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Alibaba-RISC-V-16-Core-2.5GHz

Interestingly, they say they actually do plan on open-sourcing some parts of the design. I wonder if that'll just be some I/O blocks, like PCIe or memory controllers.