Chinese researchers show RISC-V CPU to compete with Arm Cortex-A76

The Chinese Academy of Sciences has shown a RISC-V CPU with eight cores. The first version of the chip will be made on TSMC’s 28nm node. Future versions of the chip should eventually compete with Arm’s Cortex-A76.

A prototype of the chip was shown at the 2021 RISC-V World Conference China and is currently codenamed XiangShan. The chip was designed as an open source project by 25 students and teachers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The project started on June 11, 2020 and the participants have now submitted more than 50,000 lines of code. The project’s source code is on GitHub .

The resulting XiangShan prototype is a chip with eight cores at 1.2GHz. The processors are currently made on TSMC’s 28nm process. This current prototype uses the RV64GC base and features 1MB of L2 cache. The test chip also has a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface and support for up to 32GB DDR4 memory. The chip has been tested with Debian on an fpga platform writes CNX Software .

The makers would have plans to design a new prototype. It would be made on the 14nm node of Chinese semiconductor manufacturer SMIC and run at 2GHz. This version should be ready for production by the end of this year. Future iterations of the chips will have to compete with Arm’s Cortex-A76, which was introduced in 2018, according to the makers .

Recently, SiFive also announced two new RISC-V cores , one of which would outperform Arm’s Cortex-A55, while the SiFive cores would take up less space. Those SiFive cores would be used in an upcoming 7nm chip from Intel.