The platform aims to help developers build System-on-Chips (SoCs) to support edge applications.
Chinese tech giant Alibaba released a development platform to help engineers build high-performance and silicon-based SoCs on the RISC-V open architecture, according to The Register. Alibaba said the platform includes an optimized software stack to help speed up product rollout.
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud subsidiary of the online bazaar, announced that the Wujian 600 chip development platform is now available for licensing, aimed at the design of edge SoCs using the RISC-V instruction-set architecture. The architecture is freely available to implement for chip designers under open-source licensing.
The company said that the platform is intended to aid engineers by reducing development costs and shortening design cycles for custom chips, making the mass production of high-performance RISC-V SoCs a reality.
Alibaba is already using the platform
According to Alibaba, the Wujian 600 platform was created by another Alibaba Group subsidiary, its wholly owned semiconductor business T-Head. Alibaba said it already used the platform for the development and prototyping of its own high-performance SoC, the TH1520.
The TH1520 is listed as a 2.5GHz chip that embeds a quadcore Xuantie C910 CPU, a neural processing unit (NPU), DDR memory controllers and a wide range of standard I/O interfaces.
The XuanTie C910 RISC-V processor itself is available as an open-source design from T-Head, and can be found on GitHub. Alibaba’s Wujian 600 platform was endorsed by RISC-V International, the organization that oversees the open-source chip architecture.
“The Wujian 600 development platform enables powerful edge SoCs with enhanced frequency and increased storage for robust edge-AI computing”, said RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond. “The developer ecosystem supporting Xuantie on Linux and Android further strengthens the RISC-V software ecosystem.”
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