Alibaba Cloud has unveiled its latest chip development platform Wujian 600 to help global developers in the design of high-performance SoCs for edge-AI computing leveraging the RISC-V instruction-set architecture, the company announced on August 24 on its website.

“We hope to share our development capability of RISC-V based high-performance chips with the launch of Wujian 600,” said Meng Jianyi, vice president of T-Head. “Customers can leverage the platform to develop their high-performance SoCs in a fast and efficient way. By making the platform accessible to global developers, we hope to contribute to the RISC-V community, enabling more customised RISC-V based SoCs tailored for different applications.”

"The Wujian 600 development platform enables powerful edge SoCs with enhanced frequency and increased storage for robust edge-AI computing. The developer ecosystem supporting Xuantie on Linux and Android further strengthens the RISC-V software ecosystem,” said Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International. “This is a great example of collaboration across the thriving RISC-V community."

Custom-built by Alibaba Group’s chip development business, T-Head, Wujian 600 has been tailored specifically for developing edge SoCs.With enhanced CPU capability and heterogeneous architecture for high-performance embedded and edge products, the platform facilitates the design of SoCs in embedded applications, including home robots, medical imaging and video conferencing. It also includes an optimised software stack to help speed up the rollout of products to the market, said Alibaba Cloud.

Available for licensing, the platform aims to aid global developers by reducing the development costs and shortening the design cycle of chips, making the mass production of RISC-V based high-performance SoCs a reality, the Chinese e-commerce giant reported.

“Together with our partners in the growing RISC-V software ecosystem, we will continue to enrich the platform in order to supply global developers with the latest technologies and toolkits, bringing the RISC-V based SoCs to broader use in various sectors,” said Meng.

Earlier this year, Alibaba Cloud announced it has 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 artificial intelligence, according to the company.