The flagship CPU Xuantie C950, released by Alibaba DAMO Academy in March this year, has recently achieved a significant milestone in its development history—successfully running the Tongyi Qianwen 3.8-27B large model natively. This breakthrough marks the first time that a RISC-V architecture chip has directly driven a large artificial intelligence model with 27 billion parameters without relying on GPU or any simulation layer, demonstrating remarkable technical potential.

As a 64-bit server-grade processor, the Xuantie C950 is manufactured using TSMC's 5nm process technology and integrates up to 64 computing cores internally. These cores are interconnected via a high-speed AMBA CHI bus, with 8 cores grouped together. The chip can reach a maximum clock speed of 3.2GHz. In terms of hardware architecture, it not only features an 8-instruction decoding width and a 16-stage pipeline design, which increases memory bandwidth by more than four times compared to its predecessor, the Xuantie C920, but also directly integrates matrix acceleration engines and vector acceleration engines optimized for AI inference workloads. Thanks to its outstanding design, its single-core general performance has exceeded 70 points in the SPECint2006 benchmark test, successfully setting a new performance record for RISC-V CPUs worldwide.

In practical performance, when driving the Tongyi Qianwen 3.8-27B model, the Xuantie C950 achieves a decoding speed of 30 tokens per second, with the first token latency stably controlled within 1.9 seconds. Traditionally, running such a large-scale model would require 16GB to 24GB of dedicated GPU memory. However, the Xuantie C950 can complete the entire inference process independently using just the CPU itself and the on-chip acceleration engine, eliminating the need for external dedicated graphics cards.

From a macro industry ecosystem perspective, RISC-V's open-source nature provides unique strategic advantages. Unlike models that rely on x86 or ARM architectures and require paying high licensing fees, Alibaba has fully controlled the Tongyi model family, cloud computing infrastructure, and Xuantie chip architecture, achieving full supply chain autonomy from the underlying chip design to the top-level model inference. This vertical integration capability means that future model operators can be deeply redesigned according to hardware characteristics, and subsequent chips can directly customize specialized instruction sets based on actual data from production environments, opening up new paths for the diversification of AI infrastructure.