XiangShan open-source 64-bit RISC-V processor to rival Arm Cortex-A76
Very cool to see a team of 25 students put this together and get prototypes made. I wish opportunities like these were available back in my college days.<p>The headline is getting slightly ahead of the actual performance. Reaching Cortex-A76 performance is their goal after many more iterations. Their current implementation is not there yet, but that shouldn't detract from the magnitude of their achievement and their contribution to the open-source world:<p>> This culminated with an 8-core prototype built based on Yanqihu (雁栖湖) architecture using TSMC’s 28nm process with the processor running up to 1.2 or 1.3 GHz that should be taped out this month. But plans have been made to tape out a new prototype based on Nanhu (南湖) by the end of the year, using SMIC’s 14nm process allowing up to 2 GHz frequency, and further iterations of the architecture will aim at rivaling Arm’s Cortex-A76 processor.<p>RISC-V is an exciting development in the SoC world. We're starting to see some of HiFive's boards trickle out into the wild. The performance is good, but it's not quite as groundbreaking as many of the headlines make it out to be. The most exciting part of all of this is that ARM has more competition and we get to see some open-source contributions like this.