It is China’s key towards technological self -sufficiency

RISC-V architecture plays a central role in China’s strategy. This technology is A free hardware alternative Both Intel and AMD X86-64 designs and CPUs with ARM architecture that have proliferated in recent years. For the country led by Xi Jinping represents the opportunity to hold its technological development Despite the sanctions of the US -led alliance. In fact, the Chinese government has created a consortium of companies and research institutes that seeks to develop chips with this architecture.

Tencent, Alibaba and the Academy of Sciences of China are some of the organizations that are working on the development of RISC-V architecture, and the US administration is very worried. It is because this technology can be used to point out extraordinarily capable supercomdators. In fact, Europe already has Epac ready (European Processor Accelerator), its first RISC-V chip, and has been designed to reside inside the next European superorders.

Alibaba’s Xuantie C930 processor is a great opportunity for China

At the end of August the Chinese company Unisoc presented its E450R chipa processor implemented on the RISC-V architecture that integrates an asymmetric cryptography engine 50% faster than that implemented by UNISOC in its previous security chip. In addition, according to this company, it offers a 50% improvement in transactions -based applications, so, a priori, it is ideal for high demand environments. Anyway, as we have seen, there are other Chinese companies working in RISC-V processors.

Damo Academy, the Alibaba subsidiary dedicated to research, has developed The Xuantie C930 server processor. This chip with RISC-V architecture is expressly designed for work on high performance environmentslike the servers of the data centers, and, even, the autonomous cars, so it represents a very important step of China at a juncture in which the US sanctions and its allies prevent you from accessing the processors for more advanced servers currently available.

Nor Guangnan, an academic from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, has declared That “this open source chip will help build an inclusive and collaborative Global RISC-V ecosystem, becoming the new disruption engine of the semiconductor industry.” On the other hand, an analyst from the Guotai Junan Securities consultant assures that “in the same way that Depseek has challenged OpenAi monopoly with its open source advantages, low cost and high performance, RISC-V shows significant potential in the AI ​​era.”

These two statements synthesize very well why this Alibaba processor is so important to China. In fact, the country led by Xi Jinping needs this type of solutions to sustain its technological development despite the restrictions that come from the US and its allies. In addition, Alibaba has confirmed that he will begin to distribute this chip to his clients During this Marchalthough it has not required how many units it currently has. What has corroborated is that it will maintain its available design to graduate it to other integrated circuit designers who are interested in it.

Image | Chinese Academy of Sciences

More information | SCMP

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