Alibaba Crafts A 16-Core RISC-V Chip @ 2.5GHz

To date there haven't been any really compelling RISC-V processors from a performance perspective but it's looking like we could soon be crossing that threshold.

Alibaba this week announced a RISC-V 64-bit processor comprised of 16 cores at 2.5GHz. The Chinese RISC-V CPU is fabbed at 12nm and this RISC-V processor supports out of order execution. This Alibaba design achieves a 7.1 Coremark/MHz rating, a great deal faster than any other publicly announced RISC-V processor. It's still not as fast as say the newest AMD Ryzen 9 or Intel Core i7/i9 parts, but it's certainly much better than all of the other RISC-V processors/SoCs we've seen announced to date. Unfortunately additional details on this Alibaba design are light.

Alibaba will be using this CPU for edge computing purposes and other domestic uses. But it's unlikely we'll see this RISC-V chip available outside of China, thus likely no benchmarks. But hopefully it won't be too much longer before a US company is able to achieve such an interesting RISC-V design -- Alibaba says they make some elements of their processor open-source.