SiFive Performance P550 was supposed to be the most powerful RISC-V core to date, capable of outperforming Arm’s Cortex-A75 core in raw performance, but especially in terms of efficiency, with three times the performance per mm2. But there may be an even more powerful RISC-V processor, albeit developed as a research project, with the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS)’s XiangShan open-source processor presented at the recent RISC-V World Conference China 2021 with the goal of matching Cortex-A76 performance. The project was launched on June 11, 2020, and 25 classmates and teachers participated in the development of Xiangshan with 821 main branch code mergers, 3296 code submissions, more than 50,000 lines of code, and more than 400 documents, mostly in Chinese only for now. This culminated with an 8-core prototype built based on Yanqihu (雁栖湖) architecture using TSMC’s 28nm process with the processor running up to 1.2 or 1.3 GHz that […]
XiangShan open-source 64-bit RISC-V processor to rival Arm Cortex-A76
