The Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT CAS) has showcased progress on a fully open-source processor, designed around the RISC-V architecture, which it hopes will offer competition for Arm parts at the performance end of the market.
Developed from the opening of a GitHub repository to booting Debian Linux in a matter of months, with work currently progressing on a higher-performance second iteration, XiangShan, or “Fragrant Hills”, comes with bold promises as spotted by our friends at Heise. Once optimised, its creators claim, it will go toe-to-toe with Arm’s top-end Cortex-A76 processor cores – and it will do so while being available under an open-source licence.