On October 19, the RISC-V China Summit was held in Shenzhen. As an open-source CPU instruction set architecture, RISC-V is rapidly catching up with X86 and Arm, and entering high-value fields such as AI, servers, and automotive. At the summit, Alibaba DAMO Academy revealed that XuanTie RISC-V processors, through architectural innovation, software compatibility, and ecosystem cooperation, have significantly improved performance in fields such as Agentic AI and servers, driving high-performance RISC-V from "usable" to "reliable" and toward large-scale mass production and deployment. At the same time, DAMO Academy released a processor product roadmap for autonomous driving and embodied intelligence, pushing RISC-V into entirely new fields.
According to forecasts by industry organizations, annual shipments of RISC-V processors are maintaining rapid growth of 50%, with market share expected to reach about 25% by 2030. DAMO Academy released the XuanTie C950 in the 3rd month (March) of this year, setting a new global RISC-V performance record. Meng Jianyi, Chief Scientist of DAMO Academy, said in a keynote speech at the summit: "For high-performance RISC-V to truly move toward mass production and deployment, we need not only benchmark processor products, but also continuous software and hardware technology R&D and engineering verification, refining it from 'usable' and 'reliable' to outstanding performance." He explained that the XuanTie C950 has become an innovation foundation for the technological evolution of high-performance RISC-V.
He explained that the XuanTie C950 has become an innovation foundation for the technological evolution of high-performance RISC-V. For server-grade high-performance scenarios, the XuanTie multi-core interconnect product XT-LINK helps the C950 continuously improve multi-core performance linearity. For AI applications, the full XuanTie product line accelerates the integration of general-purpose computing, matrix acceleration, memory bandwidth, and software co-optimization. The XuanTie C950 performs well on four types of Agentic workloads, improving by more than 10% compared to mainstream traditional architecture processors. Its performance in running cloud-based MoE and edge-side Dense models has also improved further. For example, for Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, released in the 8th month (August) of this year, the inference speed reaches 43 token/s.
Meanwhile, DAMO Academy's XuanTie is laying out high-performance automotive-grade processors for autonomous driving and embodied intelligence, pushing RISC-V into entirely new fields. At the summit, it released the automotive-grade enhanced processor XuanTie E908A, the first RISC-V CPU IP to simultaneously meet both ASIL-B and ASIL-D standards, with Single-Point Fault Metric (SPFM) exceeding 90% for the first time in the industry, providing a safe and reliable real-time computing foundation for scenarios such as safety islands, domain controllers, and in-vehicle gateways. DAMO Academy also released product roadmaps for autonomous driving and embodied intelligence for the first time, with the next-generation C950A targeting performance 5 times that of existing RISC-V automotive-grade products.
Along with the rapid development of RISC-V, ecosystem co-building and avoiding fragmentation have become shared industry concerns. DAMO Academy's XuanTie is an important open-source contributor and standard setter in the international RISC-V community. In compilers, DAMO Academy's RISC-V-related contributions in the GCC community rank second globally, bringing more than 10% typical performance improvements to RISC-V processors. In the Java ecosystem, more than half of the RISC-V code in the OpenJDK community comes from DAMO Academy, and the XuanTie C950 is the first to achieve deep adaptation and optimization between RISC-V and server Java, with a 30% performance improvement. In operating systems, DAMO Academy's RISC-V is supported by multiple commercial operating system versions, on which large commercial application software such as Taobao, DingTalk, WeChat, and WPS have been run successfully. In RISC-V International, XuanTie has deeply participated in building the RVI CSC certification baseline, open-sourced 2,796 test cases, and promoted the establishment of global RISC-V compatibility testing standards.
Looking to the future, DAMO Academy responds to more architectural innovation challenges through open cooperation. DAMO Academy, together with the Beijing Institute of Open Source Chips and ZTE Microelectronics, has achieved phased results in cutting-edge technologies such as Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), realizing a dual-thread performance gain of 30%. At the same time, DAMO Academy participates in building the Ruyi Community of the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with more than 20 institutions at home and abroad to promote software adaptation related to the matrix computing AME instruction set extension. In addition, DAMO Academy continues to contribute standard technologies to RISC-V International and contributed ecosystem development boards to the global RISC-V software ecosystem program "RISE", promoting rich edge-side software adaptation and optimization.
It is reported that the RISC-V China Summit, together with the North America Summit and the Europe Summit, ranks as one of the three major global RISC-V summits. RISC-V International CEO Andrea Gallo said at the event: "From AI to robotics, RISC-V's cutting-edge breakthroughs are everywhere, and China is playing a leading role in many technology directions!"
This article was provided by Alibaba and republished by QbitAI with authorization; the views belong to the original author.