Alibaba launches RISC-V-based XuanTie C930 server CPU — AI/HPC chip ships this month, more designs to follow

Alibaba announced its newest CPU release this week with the XuanTie C930. The new RISC-V processor is built for AI-HPC workloads, and Alibaba describes it as its 'first server-grade processor' in an article published by the South China Morning Post.

Damo Academy, Alibaba's research and development institute, announced the XuanTie C930 at a conference in Beijing on Friday. Alibaba first teased the C930 last year when the company confirmed a 2024 release for the server chip. Now, a year after its first teasers, the C930 is here to herald a new era of Alibaba's RISC-V production.

We still don't know much about the C930, despite this announcement. No core counts, clock speeds, or cache sizes were shared in Alibaba's SCMP article. No performance numbers or claims about the C930 have been found either, at least looking in from the Western internet. Some Chinese publications have touted a performance claim of 15 points per GHz in the legacy SPECint2006 benchmark, but these numbers have been tied to rumors around the chip since March of last year.

However, it should be said that Alibaba does have a solid reputation for CPU performance; the company's Yitian 710 was found to be the fastest Arm-based CPU for cloud servers last year, with the 128-core chip even beating out Intel's 48-core Xeon Platinum 8488C in some efficiency benchmarks. Based on its pedigree, it would not be surprising for the C930 to end up performing beyond expectations, though we may never get our hands on the chip to see for ourselves.

Damo Academy also announced a plan for more new RISC-V chips to follow the C930 under the XuanTie badge: the C908X, R908A, and XL200. These will be intended for AI acceleration, automotive use, and high-speed connectivity, respectively. News of these new chips arrived immediately following Alibaba's announcement of its ¥380 billion ($52 billion) investment plan in AI and cloud infrastructure over the next three years.

Alibaba has done much to push the RISC-V CPU market forward since entering the scene in 2019. Damo Academy claimed that its CPU team "has supported the implementation of more than 30 percent of RISC-V high-performance processors" at the C930 launch.

RISC-V adoption is one of the only paths for Chinese companies to push forward their CPU innovation, thanks to intense U.S. export laws blocking the nation from access to more established ISAs. With a new administration in the White House that seems even more bullish on the U.S.-China Chip War, Alibaba and other Chinese tech companies will likely continue innovating on RISC-V. Due to RISC-V being an open-source architecture held by a non-American foundation, it is safe from U.S. trade intervention (for now).