Chip war: Chinese scientists vow to launch breakthrough RISC-V open-source CPU in 2025
Efforts by the Chinese Academy of Sciences form part of Beijing’s push to reduce reliance on foreign semiconductor technology
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.
