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Alibaba/T-HEAD's Xuantie C910: An open source RISC-V core
- gnfargbl 2y agoThere are some comparative benchmarks on a slightly older post: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/a-risc-v-progress-check-benchmarking https://chipsandcheese.com/p/a-risc-v-progress-check-benchma...
- spaceman_2020 2y ago87 points and no comments? Strange!
- simion314 2y agowhy strange, you really wanted to see my comment "nice article with good research"? but I am not a hardware guy so it might be filled with mistakes.
- haunter 2y agoMy usual HN observation: - If points are (significantly) higher than comments: the submission is very niche or highly technical that a lot of people can appreciate but only a few can meaningful comment. See right now here 120 vs 14 - If comments are higher than points or levitating towards 1:1 ratio: casual topic or flamewar (politics). See the DOGE post on the front page now, 1340 vs 2131 That being said I think "healthy" posts have a 1.5:1 - 2:1 ratio
- misiek08 2y agoI think „scary” is the best word. If of course rumor about choosing RISC-V over ARM is true! We just saw big win of ARM over Intel's multi-decade scam and yet here we are with another split from ARM, because of politics. Scary to see how stupid, talking people, convincing other people to hate without real reasons can lead to such stories…
- stonogo 2y agoI'm less convinced the RISC-V move is about politics and more convinced it's about not paying for ARM licenses.
- Malidir 2y agoArm is Softbank. And Softbank is all in on Team USA.
- JoachimS 2y agoAt least in the USA, Europe. Remember ARM China going rouge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28329731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28329731
- pantalaimon 2y agoBut they don't have access to new designs and no way to add new architecture extensions that could be widely adopted.
- Mistletoe 2y agoChina is already red.
- martinsnow 2y agoI don't see how they went rouge? https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/arm-lays-off-70-software-engineers-in-china/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/arm-lays-off-70-s... Arm is still in control. Some went to form another company however.
- buyucu 2y agosoftbank is usually the dumb money on the poker table, funding bad ideas long after anyone intelligent leaves them. wework is probably the best example. getting funded by softbank is probably a good proxy indicator for companies losing their competitive edge.
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- whatever1 2y agoApart from the lip service that has obvious reasons to support that latest chip technology is crucial to the national security, I fail to understand why this is the case. What is the disadvantage that a country has if they only have access to computer technology from the 2010s? They will still make the same airplanes, drones, radars tanks and whatever. It seems to me that it is nice to have SOTA manufacturing capability for semi-conductors but not necessary.
- bzzzt 2y ago> What is the disadvantage that a country has if they only have access to computer technology from the 2010s? Try running a LLM on hardware from 2010.
- whatever1 2y agoRunning LLMs I am absolutely positive I could do with my Dell r810 cluster back in 2010, if I had access to DeepSeek. Training a frontier model probably not. Again not clear what is the strategic benefit of having access to a frontier LLM model vs a more compact & less capable one.
- Almondsetat 2y agoGovernment office computers need LLMs?
- pjc50 2y agoAt this rate they're going to get them whether they need them or not. Big push in the west for "AI everywhere" e.g. Microsoft Copilot; UK has some ill-defined AI push https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crr05jykzkxo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crr05jykzkxo
- nabla9 2y agoIn the early 2000s, bringing China into the global community was widely seen as a strategic decision. The Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations supported integrating China’s economy into the international rules-based system. China did not want to integrate. China has been seeking strategic independence in its economy by developing alternative layers of global economic ties, including the Belt and Road Initiative, PRC-centered supply chains, and emerging country groupings for longer than US. Too much technological ties with China are seen as a potential vulnerability. It's not just technology itself, but it's importance in trade and economy. If the US or its allies have value chains tightly integrated with China on strategic components, it creates dependence.
- fcanesin 2y agoApache-2 open source: https://github.com/XUANTIE-RV/openc910 https://github.com/XUANTIE-RV/openc910
- unit149 2y ago[dead]
- klelatti 2y agoOpen source but my impression is that this contains verilog generated by another program?
- pjc50 2y agoCould you point at some examples? It's not unusual for things to be code-generated and it doesn't necessarily impact the license.
- klelatti 2y agoAll the RTL basically. It’s in a directory called gen_rtl (generated RTL?) and has remarkably few comments for such a complex code base. Also although technically it's open source if it's generated verilog then isn't that a lot less useful than the code that was used to generate the rtl?
- RobotToaster 2y agohttps://github.com/XUANTIE-RV/openc910/issues/9 https://github.com/XUANTIE-RV/openc910/issues/9 Vperl, apparently
- klelatti 2y agoThank you, that's very helpful.
- Alifatisk 2y agoThey used words like ”ultra” high performance, I am not that knowledgeable to confirm this, but is it really that?
- stonogo 2y agoOnly compared to other RISC-V processors.
- gnfargbl 2y agoFrom the benchmarks on another of the blog posts, I very roughly estimate this to be about 1/50 the performance of a Ryzen 7950X for CPU-bound tasks not requiring vector instructions. For vectorizable workloads it will be much slower due to the lack of software SIMD support.
- JoachimS 2y agoAnother amazing analysis by Chester Lam. I'm astounded of the cadence and persistence, and at the same time the depth and comprehensiveness.
- nxobject 2y agoI swear there's one brillaint chip journalist/analyst at every moment that has the Mandate of Heaven to do brilliant things. Anand Lal Shimpi was that person once, then Ian Cutress...
- IanCutress 2y agoWe need to get Chester on the podcast more :)
- clamchowder 2y agoOh that should be fun. Would have to fit it around work though
- logicchains 2y agoDoes anyone know why 910 is used for both this and Huawei's 910 AI chip? Does 910 have some special meaning in Chinese, or is it just a coincidence?
- magicalhippo 2y agoYet I also feel the things C910 does well are overshadowed by executing poorly on the basics. The core’s out-of-order engine is poorly balanced, with inadequate capacity in critical structures like the schedulers and register files in relation to its ROB capacity. CPU performance is often limited by memory access performance, and C910’s cache subsystem is exceptionally weak. The cluster’s shared L2 is both slow and small, and the C910 cores have no mid-level cache to insulate L1 misses from that L2. DRAM bandwidth is also lackluster. I'm not a CPU designer but shouldn't this be points that one could discover using higher-level simulators? Ie before even needing to do FPGA or gate-level sims? If so, are they doing a SpaceX thing where they iterate fast with known less-than-optimal solutions just to gain experience building the things?
- pjc50 2y agoQuite likely, yes. It should be possible to make estimates of how much your cache misses are going to impact speed. But there's a tradeoff. It looks like they've chosen small area/low power over absolute speed. Which may be entirely valid for whatever use case they're aiming at. Note from the git history is that this is basically a 2021 design. https://github.com/XUANTIE-RV/openc910/commits/main/ https://github.com/XUANTIE-RV/openc910/commits/main/
- brucehoult 2y agoNo, that's when they open sourced it. It was designed in 2018/early 2019 and picked up the May 2019 RVV spec. By late 2021 I already had a commercially sold C910 dev board (RVB ICE). https://linuxgizmos.com/dev-kit-debuts-risc-v-xuantie-c910-soc-with-a-3d-gpu-and-android-and-linux-support/ https://linuxgizmos.com/dev-kit-debuts-risc-v-xuantie-c910-s... Android was shown running on an earlier C910 board (ICE EVB) for the same THead ICE test chip already by January 2021: https://www.hackster.io/news/alibaba-s-t-head-releases-open-source-android-10-port-for-risc-v-chips-1b3265755785 https://www.hackster.io/news/alibaba-s-t-head-releases-open-...
- torginus 2y agoHas it been demonstrated that RISC-V is architecturally suitable for making chips that equal the performance of high-end x86 and ARM designs? I remember this post,by an ARM engineer, who was highly critical of the RISC-V ISA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24958423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24958423
- Havoc 2y agoIf I was an arm engineer I’d be critical of something threatening my job too
- klelatti 2y agoFor clarity from the original analysis > This document was originally written several years ago. At the time I was working as an execution core verification engineer at Arm. The following points are coloured heavily by working in and around the execution cores of various processors. Apply a pinch of salt; points contain varying degrees of opinion. > It is still my opinion that RISC-V could be much better designed; though I will also say that if I was building a 32 or 64-bit CPU today I'd likely implement the architecture to benefit from the existing tooling.
- gpderetta 2y agoAs long as it looks vaguely like any other register based ISAs, generally there is very little in an architecture that would prevent making an high performance implementation. Some details might make it more difficult, but Intel has shown very effectively that with enough thrust even pigs can fly. The details would be in the microarchitecture, which would not be specified by RISC-V.
- dist-epoch 2y agoAnd people have been even more critical about x86 architecture. It doesn't matter that much.
- Narishma 2y ago> Has it been demonstrated that RISC-V is architecturally suitable for making chips that equal the performance of high-end x86 and ARM designs? How would you demonstrate that besides actually building such a chip?
- sylware 2y agoThis site is so good (for now...). That said, isn't the C910 with a critical buggy vector block? It is amazing acheivement in a saturated market. The road for reaching a fully mature and performant large RISC-V implementation is still long (to catch up with the other ones)... ... but a royalty free ISA is priceless, seriously.
- teleforce 2y agoCan we have open source and RISC-V inserted into the title to be more descriptive?
- hassleblad23 2y agoI wonder if the Nvidia stock can rally as much now as it did in the past.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]