Alibaba crafts world's 'fastest' 'open-source' RISC-V processor yet

[Karel]

Alibaba crafts world's 'fastest' 'open-source' RISC-V processor yet: 16 cores, 64-bit, 2.5GHz, 12nm, out-of-order exec
Coming to an FPGA near you, soon, maybe, hopefully?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/27/alibaba_risc_v_chip/

[SiliconWizard]

That's interesting.

As I get it, the business model would rely on some kind of licensing obviously, so even if they release the full RTL source code as open source, which I'm not completely sure of yet, you are probably just going to be able to play with it and not much more.

As for FPGAs, given the general specs of this processor, you would probably need a pretty big FPGA just to be able to put a single core of it...

[brucehoult]

Yup, I'd expect even a single core won't fit on an Arty or other cheap Artix-7 board. We've recently changed our standard FPGA board for CPU development from the $3500 VC707 to the $8000 VCU118 (same FPGA as Amazon F1, IIRC). And you're still only running something of that complexity at not a lot more than 100 MHz.

It's not clear what development stage Alibaba are at. They certainly weren't showing actual chips. They might not actually be ahead of other people.

It will be good to get cores of this level out in silicon. On paper it should be competitive with the Cortex A75.

[Petrary]

That's interesting.