A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China’s top government research academy, pledged to produce this year a processor based on the open-source chip-design architecture RISC-V, as part of China's semiconductor self-reliance drive amid escalating U.S. restrictions. 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.
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 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 customize 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 U.S., the South China Morning Post reports.
