US could ban RISC-V exports to China as Alibaba develops 3072-core RISC-V cloud server and Sunway reveals powerful 390-core RISC supercomputer CPU

While the U.S. is actively making efforts to slow China’s compute power developments through X86, Arm and AI bans, the two countries do not seem to have any qualms when it comes to the rapidly evolving  RISC-V microarchitecture. Not yet, at least. As a testament to the unrestricted RISC-V developments, the Chinese tech giant Alibaba surprised everyone with an announcement for its latest cloud server powered by 3,072 RISC-V cores during this years’ RISC-V Summit held in Santa Clara, California.

Alibaba has been experimenting with non-X86 technology for some years now. In 2021, the company announced a 128-core Arm-based server processor, but, with the U.S. imposing Arm tech export bans throughout 2022 and 2023, RISC-V became Alibaba’s focus on the server side. Its latest cloud server processor offerings completely developed and produced in China now include the Sophon SG2042 model with 64 RISC-V cores clocked at 2 GHz, 64 MB system cache and PCIe 4.0 support. According to HPCWire, 48 of these chips are used for the 3,072-core cloud server.

China is also making advancements with 64-bit RISC-based technology on the supercomputer side. The latest Sunway SW26010 CPU featuring 390 cores (385 compute + 5 MPE) clocked at 2.25 GHz is said to process 13.8 TFLOPS in FP64, which is almost 3 times faster compared to AMD’s EPYC 9654 X86 CPU. All this despite the limited memory interface that only supports 128-bit DDR4-3200 RAM. However, Sunway managed to increase the total RAM capacity per CPU from 32 to 96 GB.

Of course, all these developments have not gone unnoticed by the U.S. lawmakers, yet there is currently little that can be done to limit China’s access to RISC-based tech due to the open source nature of the architecture that is largely promoted by U.S. companies. Reuters notes that existing rules on chip exports could help provide a legal framework for open source IPs, as well, but this may also set a dangerous precedent.

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