RISC-V architecture is officially rising from a "strong backup" to become the "top player" in the computing market.

On March 24, at the 2026 Xuantie RISC-V Ecosystem Conference held in Shanghai, DAMO Academy of Alibaba officially announced the high-performance RISC-V CPU Xuantie C950. The release of this processor not only set a new performance record for RISC-V globally but also marked the first time that a CPU has native support for trillion-parameter large models.

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Performance Breakthrough: Single-core score exceeds 70

As the latest flagship product of DAMO Academy, Xuantie C950 has undergone an aggressive upgrade in its core architecture:

Hardcore specifications: It adopts 8 instruction decoding, 16 pipeline stages, and a disorder window with over 1000 instructions, with a maximum frequency of up to 3.2GHz.

Performance record: In the SPECint2006 benchmark test, its single-core general performance exceeded 70 for the first time, making it the most powerful RISC-V processor in the world today.

Efficiency and performance: In typical tasks such as cloud networking and cloud storage, its performance is more than 30% higher than mainstream products.

Native AI acceleration: A new home for trillion-parameter large models

Aside from extreme general computing power, DAMO Academy also launched two native AI acceleration engines: Vector and Matrix.

These two engines are unified in addressing with the Xuantie CPU, achieving a deep integration of general computing power and AI computing power. Test results show that this architecture can smoothly run top large models such as Qwen3-235B and DeepSeek V3-671B. This is the first time in the industry that a CPU has native support for trillion-parameter large models, providing a new hardware sample for servers in the AI Agent era.

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Ecosystem Expansion: Targeting 36 billion units shipped

At the press conference, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Ni Guangnan stated that RISC-V is rapidly moving toward mainstream. Industry data shows that by 2031, the shipment of RISC-V devices is expected to reach 3.6 billion.

To accelerate this process, DAMO Academy has been active:

Strong partnerships: Signed agreements with the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Beijing Open Source Chip Research Institute to jointly develop the next-generation open-source Xiangshan CPU.

System compatibility: Collaborated with openKylin to create a RISC-V-native AI operating system, and supports OpenClaw deployment.

Mass production acceleration: Currently, the Xuantie series has already been applied to more than 200 mass-produced chips, widely used in cutting-edge fields such as AI glasses and power industrial control.

From edge devices to high-end servers, Chinese technology power represented by Alibaba