The first Xuantie Partner Conference, organized by Alibaba Group’s chip development business, T-Head, took place in Shanghai, China last week. It marks another major milestone in the development of RISC-V, in line with the rapidly expanding number of intelligent applications – from home appliances to enterprise communications tools – which have accelerated the rapid adoption of the instruction set architecture.
According to RISC International, the number of RISC-V based processors reached 10 billion in 2022, and it is estimated that the number of RISC-V processors will rise to 80 billion by 2025.
Contributors to the thriving RISC-V community globally include companies like T-Head. The company launched a series of RISC-V based processors, called the XuanTie series. The series can meet the demands of various workloads, including those that require relatively high computing performance, high energy efficiency and real-time data processing.
Additionally, major operating systems – including Android, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Longxi, Tongxin, openKylin and RTT – can now run on the RISC-V based XuanTie processors. This indicates that a wide range of applications can be powered by RISC-V through either cloud, desktop or edge devices, for added flexibility. Earlier this year, T-Head announced it made further progress in porting basic Android functions onto the RISC-V instruction set architecture. This makes it feasible to use RISC-V based Android devices in scenarios ranging from multimedia to signal processing, device interconnection and other applications.
“The implementation of XuanTie C908 represents the first compatible test results received by RISC-V International, under our RISC-V Compatibility Program,” said Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International. “We recognize the increasing value this will bring to the ecosystem and the many stakeholders investing in RISC-V.”
More progress on the software tools and applications was revealed at the recent conference. T-Head launched a series of software compilers and deployment tools including TAC, CDK, and HBB, with the aim of improving the development efficiency at the RISC-V software ecosystem.
T-Head also plays a key role in contributing to the standardization of implementing the instruction set architecture, chairing 11 technology workforces at RISC-V International. The firm is also promoting standards such as the RVV1.0 standard for computing and the Matrix standard, as well as other standards to help expediate synergy within the community.
To encourage more players to contribute to the RISC-V community, T-Head has launched an online RISC-V Institute to help developers to keep abreast of the latest technology developments. T-Head has also rolled out incentive programs, including “XuanTie Preferred SoC” and “XuanTie Preferred Customer” to encourage partners to adopt the SoCs based on the RISC-V instruction set architecture in various applications, and to contribute to the ecosystem and the community.
“The thriving RISC-V community, underpinned by principles of openness and collaboration, embraces further growth momentum driven by cooperation among global developers,” said Jianyi Meng, Vice President of T-Head. “T-Head will continue to connect developers and partners globally to promote the sustainable development of the RISC-V community, bringing more inclusive technologies to participants at the broader open-source ecosystem.”