Alibaba, one of the largest Chinese IT companies, announced the discovery of developments related to the XuanTie E902, E906, C906 and C910 processor cores, built on the basis of the 64-bit RISC-V instruction set architecture. XuanTie's open kernels will be developed under the new names OpenE902, OpenE906, OpenC906, and OpenC910.
Schemes, descriptions of hardware blocks in the Verilog language, a simulator and related project documentation are published on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. Separately published versions of the GCC and LLVM compilers adapted to work with XuanTie chips, the Glibc library, the Binutils toolkit, the U-Boot bootloader, the Linux kernel, the OpenSBI (RISC-V Supervisor Binary Interface) binding interface, the Yocto platform for creating embedded Linux systems, and also patches for running the android platform.
XuanTie C910, the most powerful open-source chip, is produced by T-Head on a 12nm process with a 16-core variant running at 2.5GHz. The performance of the chip 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 with more than 2.5 billion copies already, and the company is working to establish an ecosystem to further promote the RISC-V architecture not only for IoT devices, but also for other types of computing systems.
Recall that RISC-V provides an open and flexible system of machine instructions that allows you to create microprocessors for arbitrary applications, without requiring royalties and without imposing conditions on use. RISC-V allows the creation of 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, SoCs, and already manufactured chips. Operating systems with good RISC-V support include GNU/Linux (present since Glibc 2.27, binutils 2.30, gcc 7, and the Linux 4.15 kernel), FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.
In addition to RISC-V, Alibaba is also developing systems based on the ARM64 architecture. For example, simultaneously with the discovery of XuanTie technologies, a new server SoC Yitian 710 is presented, containing 128 ARMv9 cores of its own design, operating at a frequency of 3.2 GHz. The chip has 8 DDR5 memory channels and 96 PCIe 5.0 lanes. In the production of the chip, a 5 nm manufacturing process was used, which made it possible to integrate about 628 billion transistors on a 60 mmΒ² 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%.
Source: opennet.ru