Alibaba introduced the new RISC-V XuanTie processors

Alibaba, one of the largest IT companies in China, recently announced information about its developments related to the cores of the processors «XuanTie E902, E906, C906 and C910»Which are based on the 64-bit architecture of the RISC-V instruction set.

The developments of these processors are under XuanTie open source code and will be developed with the new names OpenE902, OpenE906, OpenC906 and OpenC910.

Regarding the information released diagrams, descriptions of hardware blocks are described in Verilog language, the simulator and the project documentation attached are published on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.

In addition to this and published separately, has been adapted to work with XuanTie chips GCC and LLVM compiler versions, Glibc library for Binutils tools, U-the Boot loader, Linux kernel, OpenSBI middleware interface (Supervisor Binary Interface RISC-la V machines), a platform for creating embedded systems based on Linux Yocto Project and also patches to launch the Android platform.

At the conference, Zhang highlighted his progress in the development of RISC-V, which includes its four high-performance RISC-V cores XuanTie E902, E906, C906 and C910. Alibaba announced that it has opened those cores which will now go under a new name called OpenE902, OpenE906, OpenC906 and OpenC910 respectively. Those cores are now available on T-Head Semiconductor GitHub.

Alibaba says it has sent more than 2.500 billion of those IPs. “Today we are adopting RISC-V. We've had 11 different RISC-V chips and we've seen those products support multiple operating systems. It is fast becoming the largest product group. We are working to create an ecosystem in the industry with our partners, not only on the IoT side but also on the computing side, there will be great progress and today Alibaba in RISC-V is leading the world. We have many clients and hundreds of partners who build the ecosystem together with us, ”Zhang added.

The XuanTie C910, the most powerful open chip, is manufactured by the T-Head division using a 12nm process in a 16-core version, with a frequency of 2,5 GHz. The chip performance in the Coremark test reaches 7.1 Coremark / MHz, which is superior to ARM Cortex-A73 processors. In total, Alibaba has developed 11 different RISC-V chips, of which more than 2.5 billion copies have already been released, and the company is working to establish an ecosystem to further advance the RISC-V architecture not just for IoT devices, but also for other types of computer systems.

For those who still do not know RISC-V, I can tell you that this provides an open machine instruction system and flexible that allows to create microprocessors for arbitrary applications without requiring royalties or imposing conditions of use. RISC-V allows you to create completely open SoCs and processors.

Currently, based on the RISC-V specification, various companies and communities under various free licenses (BSD, MIT, Apache 2.0) are developing several dozen variants of microprocessor cores, SoC and chips already manufactured. High-quality RISC-V supported operating systems include GNU / Linux (present since Glibc 2.27, binutils 2.30, gcc 7, and Linux 4.15 kernel), FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.

In addition to RISC-V, Alibaba also develops systems based on the ARM64 architecture. For example, simultaneously with the discovery of XuanTie technologies, a new Yitian 710 SoC server is presented, containing 128 ARMv9 cores of our own design, operating at a frequency of 3.2 GHz.

The chip is equipped with 8 channels of DDR5 memory and 96 lanes of PCIe 5.0. The chip was manufactured using a 5nm process technology, which made it possible to integrate around 60 billion transistors on a 628mm² substrate. In terms of performance, the Yitian 710 outperforms the fastest ARM chips by about 20%, and in terms of power consumption it is more efficient by about 50%.

Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details In the following link.


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