Overview
- Alibaba’s DAMO Academy introduced the XuanTie C950 in Shanghai on Tuesday, a 5 nm RISC-V server CPU clocked at 3.2 GHz for data center inference and agent tasks.
- Alibaba says the chip decodes eight instructions per cycle with a 16-stage pipeline and pairs with a self-developed Tensor Processing Engine that supports FP16 down to INT4.
- The company claims more than three times the performance of the prior C920 and cites SPECint2006 scores above 70, with independent benchmarks still outstanding.
- The design targets heavy cloud software and large-model inference, and Alibaba highlights native support for Qwen3 and DeepSeek V3 used in its AI services.
- Shares rose about 3% after the launch and Morgan Stanley kept an Overweight rating with a $180 target, while the chip’s foundry and production scale remain undisclosed as Alibaba leans on RISC-V to cut licensing costs and reduce export-control risk.