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

Written by Michael Larabel in RISC-V on 18 August 2020 at 11:48 AM EDT. 82 Comments
RISC-V
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.
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Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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