Overview
- Alibaba’s Damo Academy introduced the XuanTie C950, which debuted Tuesday in Shanghai, a 5nm RISC-V CPU core tuned for AI agents and cloud workloads.
- Company scientists said the 3.2 GHz design is the most powerful RISC-V CPU to date and more than triples the performance of the earlier C920, with an 8-instruction decode and a 16-stage pipeline.
- Alibaba did not disclose which foundry produced the core, and no independent benchmarks have confirmed the performance claims yet.
- Built on the open RISC-V standard, the core lets designers add custom instructions to speed specific AI tasks, and Alibaba is pairing it with Wukong agent tools plus T-Head’s Zhenwu 810E chips for training and inference.
- Alibaba reported T-Head shipped over 470,000 AI chips in two years and neared 10 billion yuan in annual revenue, as Chinese rivals push RISC-V solutions that analysts expect to scale rapidly through 2031.