Alibaba Cloud wants its Wujian 600 chip development platform to create edge SoCs using the RISC-V instruction-set architecture.

The company said that the platform is intended to aid engineers by reducing the development costs and shortening the design cycle for custom chips, making the mass production of high-performance RISC-V SoCs a reality.

The Wujian 600 platform was created by another Alibaba Group subsidiary and has used the platform for the development and prototyping of its own high performance TH1520 SoC.

The TH1520 is listed as a 2.5GHz chip that embeds a quad core XuanTie C910 CPU, a neural processing unit, DDR memory controllers, and a wide range of standard I/O interfaces, and has "already been used inside Alibaba's ecosystem."

The XuanTie C910 RISC-V processor is itself available as an open source design from T-Head, and can be found on GitHub.

Alibaba said it is possible to run desktop applications such as the FireFox browser and LibreOffice on silicon produced using the Wujian 600 platform, thanks to OpenAnolis, a Linux-based operating system launched by Alibaba in 2020.

Alibaba's Wujian 600 platform has been blessed by RISC-V International.

RISC-V International CEO Calista Redmond said that the Wujian 600 development platform enables powerful edge SoCs with enhanced frequency and increased storage for robust edge-AI computing.