By South China Morning Post | Created at 2025-01-06 12:11:58 | Updated at 2025-01-07 21:55:16
1 day ago
A team from China’s top government research academy pledged to produce this year a processor based on the open-source chip-design architecture RISC-V, as Beijing advances its semiconductor self-reliance drive amid escalating US restrictions.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) will be able to deliver its XiangShan open-source central processing unit in 2025, wrote Bao Yungang, deputy director at the academy’s Institute of Computing Technology, in a Weibo post on Sunday.
Initiated by the CAS in 2019, the XiangShan project aims to develop high-performance open-source processors. During a presentation at the Hot Chips 2024 semiconductor conference in Silicon Valley in August, the CAS research team described XiangShan’s goal as eventually becoming “the Linux of processors”.
Bao, who is also the secretary general of the China Open Command Ecology (RISC-V) Alliance, said the team strives to break the traditional perception that open source means low performance and low quality. It also wants to prove that an open-source project initiated by academia can result in scalable applications.
XiangShan is part of China’s growing efforts to adopt RISC-V, an open-source chip architecture that lets developers configure and customise their designs. Chinese developers are hoping that RISC-V, pronounced “risk five”, can help them reduce reliance on foreign suppliers amid an intensifying tech war with the US.
