Alibaba Reports Their XT910 RISC-V Core To Be Faster Than An Arm Cortex-A73

A few weeks back Alibaba announced the "XT910" as the fastest RISC-V processor featuring 16 cores and clock speeds up to 2.5GHz while being manufactured on a 12nm node. This by far beats most RISC-V hardware currently available and now at this week's Hot Chips conference the Chinese company is reporting that the XT910 is faster than an Arm Cortex-A73.

Alibaba confirmed the XT910 as a TSMC 12nm FinFET design with clock speeds between 2.0GHz and 2.5GHz for this RISC-V 64-bit processor supporting the RISC-V 0.7.1 Vector Extension.

Benchmarks posted by Alibaba's T-Head organization put the XT910 faster than an Arm Cortex-A73 found within the Kirin 970 SoC in areas across automotive, consumer, networking, and telecom spaces.

Making this high performance RISC-V processor even more exciting is that Alibaba wants to engage with the open-source community but as of yet hasn't been opened up.

It will be interesting to see ultimately how open of a design the XT910 becomes and whether we end up seeing any of Alibaba's RISC-V hardware in the western markets. We've certainly been wanting to see a really performant RISC-V processor and this could quite possibly be it paired with great Linux support, but for now we'll just be cautiously optimistic until learning more.