March 26, 2026 -
Claims its set performance records but looks to be years behind western fare
By Simon Sharwood, theregister.com
Alibaba has revealed a new server chip that it says is the most powerful processor ever to use the RISC-V instruction set.
According to a social media post by Alibaba’s DAMO Academy, which develops some of its chips, the new XuanTie C950 is ready to power cloudy servers, generative AI workloads, high-end robotics, and edge computing devices.
“The XuanTie C950 is equipped with a self-developed AI acceleration engine, and for the first time natively supports large models with hundreds of billions of parameters, such as Qwen3 and DeepSeek V3, potentially becoming a new type of high-end CPU for the AI Agent era,” the post enthuses.
Alibaba claims the machine’s single-core general-purpose performance “exceeded 70 points in the SPECint 2006 benchmark test.” Photos from Tuesday event at which Alibaba announced the chip suggest its SPECInt 2017 benchmark result is 2.6GHz. Per analysis by Google researcher Laurie Kirk puts it nearly on par with Apple’s M1 chip – which the iGiant launched in the year 2020.