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Alibaba/T-HEAD's Xuantie C910

T-HEAD is a wholly owned subsidiary of Alibaba, one of China's largest tech companies.

Alibaba seems to have two motivations for pushing RISC-V. On one hand, the company stands to benefit from creating cost effective chips optimized for areas it cares about, like IoT endpoints and edge computing. Simultaneously, the IF stage checks a 16 entry, fully associative L0 BTB, which lets the core handle a small number of taken branches with effectively single cycle latency. C910 is therefore caught in a position where it needs to keep a lot of instructions in flight to smooth out spikes in demand for memory bandwidth and mitigate high L2 latency, but can rarely do so in practice because its ROB capacity isn’t supported by other structures.

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