As Alibaba Launches Server-grade RISC-V CPU, Beijing Throws Its Weight Behind ISA

The permissively licensed RISC-V instruction set architecture appears to be gaining significant momentum in China.

One sign of enthusiasm for the royalty-free ISA came late last week when an outfit named XuanTie, which is part of Alibaba’s DAMO Academy R&D operation, announced a C930 CPU design that's available to license for system-on-chip makers. The CPU core is pitched as the ideal brains for servers, PCs, and autonomous cars.

XuanTie, which shares some of its RISC-V CPU cores as open source, said its C930 can be used to build “a 64-bit high-performance multi-core processor that uses a superscalar, out-of-order execution, 6-decode width, and 16-stage pipeline microarchitecture.” The core is apparently compatible with the RISC-V RVA23 profile family, and supports ISA extensions such as Vector, Crypto, Zacas, Zama16b, Smmtt, CoVE, RAS, AIA, and Zalasr.

RVA23 compatibility matters because it’s a cornerstone of the RISC-V ecosystem, ratified last year, and among other things specifies hypervisor extensions that are all-but-essential for a processor intended for deployment in servers, clouds, or other large-scale scenarios where the ability to run virtual machines is table stakes. By being RVA23 ready, the C930 meets a baseline expected of modern RISC-V systems.

Machine translation of XuanTie’s product blurb produces the following description: “C930 uses advanced micro-architecture technology to achieve high performance, including TAGE-based branch prediction algorithm, Private L2 Cache, adjustable data prefetch mechanism, etc. C930 Specint2006 performance score exceeds 15/GHz.”

We're told "a typical single cluster configuration supports four cores,” meaning you can't go licensing the C930 for a quad-core processor, and that a 64KB instruction cache, 64KB data cache, and 1MB L2 cache are all “typical” and configurable.

The included vector unit supports the RISC-V Vector 1.0 extension, handles 256-bit vector registers, and supports FP16/BF16/FP32/FP64/INT8/INT16/INT32/INT64.

Here’s a look at a diagram depicting the architecture of a C930-based system-on-chip...

XuanTie's C930 processor diagram ... Click to enlarge

Chinese media report that at the conference where the XuanTie C930 was launched, senior Alibaba Cloud execs predicted RISC-V will become a mainstream cloud architecture in five to eight years.

Xi we go, Xi we go

According to a Tuesday report from Reuters, Beijing is close to releasing a policy that that could make that prediction real.

The newswire reported that eight Chinese government bodies are working on “guidance” that will encourage widespread use of RISC-V throughout China.

Such guidance would be consistent China’s 2024 call for local orgs to stop buying American silicon and shop locally instead.

After that suggestion, Chinese chipmaker Loongson scored a ten thousand-PC pilot in Chinese schools, and a place on China’s space station. Lenovo backed Loongson by porting its hyperconverged infrastructure stack to the company’s distinctive processor architecture.

Giant telco China Mobile advised its future server procurement plans would require some machines using processors that employ the C86 architecture, a Chinese x86 variant.

A new edict from Beijing could perhaps accelerate similar purchasing plans.

• US adds Chinese RISC-V player that TSMC suspected of helping build Huawei GPUs to risky company register
• First all-Indian chips to debut this year, 25 more local designs in the works
• RISC-V is making moves, but it has work to do if it wants to hit the mainstream
• Faulty instructions in Alibaba's T-Head C910 RISC-V CPUs blow away all security

Chinese orgs have already expressed strong interest in RISC-V without notable results.

In 2021, China’s Academy of Sciences promised to release new RISC-V designs every six months. While it didn’t meet that target, in February 2025 the Academy teased a potentially powerful RISC-V design.

Middle Kingdom search giant Baidu explored datacenter-grade RISC-V chips in 2023. In the same year, Alibaba expressed a desire to create RISC-V chips capable of powering everything from wearable devices to clouds.

Results of those efforts are not yet obvious, and we’ve never heard of a Chinese RISC-V processor delivering eye-catching performance, as was the case last year when Alibaba Cloud’s Yitian 710 CPU was rated the fastest Arm chip available in any hyperscale cloud.

Alibaba achieved that result just a few years after starting work on its own designs. Perhaps it could do the same with RISC-V, although the company will need to improve on its past efforts that in August 2024 were found to have serious security flaws.

China’s RISC-V efforts are taking place as the USA leads efforts to prevent the transfer of advanced tech to the Middle Kingdom, largely on national security grounds.

US lawmakers are already worried that RISC-V’s license, which allows developers to use the architecture for free, means Chinese firms can use IP created in America to develop advanced tech. ®