RISC-V CPU for servers with 12-nanometer technology from China

The Chinese company SpacemiT has announced the VitalStone V100 server processor with potentially up to 64 RISC-V cores. SpacemiT has developed these cores called X100 itself based on the OpenC910 project. They are compatible with the current RISC-V specification RVA23 and are expected to achieve a clock frequency of up to 2.5 GHz when manufactured using 12-nanometer technology.

The VitalStone V100 comes with UEFI firmware and is designed to boot according to the RISC-V Boot and Runtime Services (BRS) specification. This means that mainboards with VitalStone V100 do not require any adjustments to the operating system, as is necessary for the hardware description with Devicetree Blobs (DTS).

Moderate performance

SpacemiT promises an integer computing performance of 9 points for the X100 core in the outdated SPEC CINT2006 benchmark. This results in 22.5 points at 2.5 GHz.

The Intel Xeon E5520 (2.27 GHz/24.1 points) and the AMD Opteron 6212 (2.6 GHz/22.9 points), which were introduced in 2009, achieved similar frequencies and integer computing power per core, but had far fewer cores.

The SpacemiT X100 offers the virtualization functions specified with RVA23, such as a hypervisor and an IOMMU. It also processes 256-bit vectors and (presumably at 2.5 GHz) should also deliver 2.5 tops of AI computing power with Int8 data.

SpacemiT emphasizes that the X100 cores are insensitive to side-channel attacks of the Spectre/Meltdown type. However, the OpenC910 project goes back to the Alibaba/XuanTie C910, in which security experts discovered several vulnerabilities (GhostWrite).

SpacemiT already sells the RISC-V processor Keystone K1 for notebooks and single-board computers.

(ciw)