The processor is said to achieve 7.1 Coremark/MHz at a frequency of 2.5GHz on a 12nm process node, which would make it 40% more powerful than any RISC-V processor produced to date.
According to the company, the Xuantie 910's performance is enabled by two innovations. One is the use of a 12-stage out-of-order operation pipeline core, enabling up to eight instructions to be loaded in each cycle, including a load as well as a store instruction; these can form clusters of four, and up to four clusters are possible per chip as it currently stands, which enables a 16-core chip. Secondly, the company said it has added 50 extended instructions to enhance various arithmetic operations, memory access, and multicore capabilities.
In addition to offering its own chip platform to system-on-chip (SoC) developers or for domain specific applications, Pingtouge is also planning to release its code as open-source on GitHub in September 2019.
Commenting Xiao Ning, vice president of Alibaba Group, said: "The traditional universal chip model is more and more difficult to adapt to the needs of fragmented AIOT [artificial intelligence Internet of things] scenarios.”
According to Ning open source is a trend that will help to address this challenge.
This is a significant move as it will enable local companies to access locally developed processor architectures at a time when accessing U.S. technology is increasingly difficult.