China's Ambitious RISC-V Project Aims for Game-Changing Chip Design by 2025

A key figure in China's efforts to develop RISC-V based processors has announced a potential 2025 release for a new high-performance chip design. Yungang Bao from the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences shared this news on Weibo, suggesting that the project, known as Xiangshan, could become a contender in the datacenter market.

The Xiangshan project aims to utilize the permissively licensed RISC-V ISA to create a high-performance chip with its Scala source code openly available. Bao has compared the ambition of this project to that of Red Hat in the Linux space, although he notes that the project has faced development challenges.

Previously, Xiangshan aimed for biannual releases, with the second-generation chip Nanhu successfully taped out in late 2023. This chip operated at 2GHz on a 14nm process node. The current focus is on the third-generation design, Kunminghu, which features an advanced micro-architecture with multiple parallel processing units capable of handling various operations, including integer and floating-point tasks.

Overview of the Kunminghu RISC-V micro-architecture.

The 64-bit RISC-V Kunminghu aims for high efficiency with designs suggesting out-of-order execution, enabling it to scale up to larger devices. The project is reportedly nearing a power consumption gap of less than 8% compared to Arm's Neoverse 2 CPU core, which is recommended for cloud and machine learning applications.

Despite some delays, the Xiangshan team continues to optimize the design for area and power consumption, with Bao admitting that the complexity of developing high-end chips has slowed progress. If successful, the project could significantly impact the market by providing an open-source alternative to proprietary designs from companies like Intel and AMD, potentially reducing China's dependency on foreign technology.

The project uses the Mulan PSL-2.0 license, allowing for a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to modify and distribute the designs, contrasting sharply with traditional licensing models in the industry. This could enable Xiangshan to disrupt the market, much like Linux did in operating systems.

While excitement surrounds the potential of Xiangshan's designs, it may take years for the project to deliver results and encourage developer engagement with the platform. Bao emphasizes that this journey will be long, and the full impact of Xiangshan will unfold over time.