Alibaba has unveiled its RV64GCV RISC-V core that will be used for its Xuantie 910 processor for cloud and edge servers. The e-commerce giant has developed one of the industry's first 64-bit RISC-V cores and system-on-chip (SoC) designed for high-performance applications. The Alibaba Xuantie 910 SoC contains up to 16 RV64GCV cores arranged in four quad-core clusters operating at 2,0 GHz ~ 2,50 GHz, as well as four AI-optimized vector compute engines (one per cluster). The processor will be used primarily by Alibaba itself to power its AI and edge servers, but could also be used for ADAS and industrial applications.
The RV64GCV core includes a 12-stage knockout pipeline that can retrieve and output eight instructions per cycle and decode three instructions per cycle. Each core has an L1 cache of up to 128KB (32/64KB for instructions, 32/64KB for data) and all cores share up to 8MB of L2 cache. The kernel supports Alibaba's proprietary RISC-V Turbo extensions that enable faster bit operations, memory access, multi-core synchronization, memory management, and cache improvements. The company claims that depending on the workload, its extensions provide a performance improvement of up to 20%.
![]()
(Image credit: AnandTech) Alibaba's RV64GCV is one of the first commercial kernels to fully support RISC-V 0.7.1 vector extensions and FP16/32/64 and INT8/16/32/64 formats. The vector engine includes two 128-bit ALUs that provide up to 300 FP16 or up to 150 FP32 GFLOPS per cluster at 2,50 GHz. Thus, the entire Xuantie 910 chip can deliver up to 1200 FP16 or 600 FP32 GFLOPS of computing power.
![]()
(Image credit: AnandTech) The developer claims that based on its experiences and emulations, its RV64GCV core offers performance comparable to Arm's Cortex-A73, released in 2016 and used for mobile SoCs like HiSilicon's Kirin 960/970, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835 and MediaTek's Helio X30. RISC-V is an open standard instruction set architecture that has been used primarily for microcontrollers and processors for basic applications. Meanwhile, several companies, including Alibaba, are working on high-performance RISC-V kernels for demanding applications. Alibaba expects to receive the final XuanTie 910 chip implemented with 12nm FinFET technology from TSMC sometime in September, and if this SoC meets all the requirements, mass production is expected to begin shortly. Also, Alibaba is working on smaller processors based on its RISC-V cores. Source: AnandTech