Alibaba's chip subsidiary has unveiled its first product. Pingtouge introduced the Xuantie 910 RISC-V (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processor at the Alibaba Cloud conference in Shanghai on Thursday.

World's Most Powerful RISC-V Processor

RISC-V, a free and open-source hardware instruction set architecture (ISA) is regarded as one of the core architectures for chip development under the artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) technology.

The 16-core Xuantie 910 achieves 7.1 Coremark/MHz at a frequency that reaches 2.5GHz on a 12nm process node, which is 40 percent more powerful that the best RISC-V processors ever produced.

The company said that the outstanding performance of the RISC-V processor is enabled by two innovations. One is the use of a 12-stage pipelined out-of-order triple issue processor with two memory accesses per cycle; and the addition of more than 50 instructions to enhance the processor's arithmetic operations, memory access, and multicore capabilities.

Enhancing High-performance Computing

Alibaba said that in the fields of 5G, AI, network communication, and autonomous driving, the processor can more than double the performance of chips and slash the cost of chips by more than half.

The processor could be used to power smart speakers, self-driving cars, and other internet-connected devices that require high-performance computing.

China Pushes To Up Local Chip Production And Purchasing

The e-commerce company does not plan to produce the processor itself but according to Reuters, it intends to monetize the processor intellectual property by licensing it to chipmakers.

The company also said that it will release parts of related code on public repository GitHub to help stimulate related development.

The unveiling of the Xuantie 910 comes as Beijing pushes local chip production and purchasing, with the goal of meeting 40 percent of domestic semiconductor demand with local supplies by the year 2020.

"It would be very helpful for China to increase long-term semiconductor sufficiency if big companies such as Alibaba jump in to build a chip (design) platform," said research company CINNO analyst Sean Yang.

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