Developed by Alibaba Group’s chip development business, T-Head, the 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 supports 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.
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.
“We hope to share our development capability of RISC-V based high-performance chips with the launch of Wujian 600,” said Jianyi Meng, 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 platform was used in the development and prototyping of the TH1520, a high-performance SoC by T-head, which brings CPU and AI computing to the edge with quad-core Xuantie C910 CPU up to 2.5GHz, 4 TOPs of NPU, 64-bit 4266MT on DDR, and a wide range of standard I/O interfaces. It has also adopted the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) security certification scheme that meets the GlobalPlatform standard. Proving the reliability of the platform, TH1520 has already been used inside Alibaba’s ecosystem.
The TH1520 uses Imagination’s BXM-4-64 GPU IP, a core from its high-efficiency performance GPU family, which offers up to a 25% lower area and up to 30% lower power than previous IMG designs and features Imagination’s IMGIC compression technology – making it suitable for complex UI solutions such as DTV, with twice the render resolution of competing designs.
Also included in the SOC is the PowerVR AX3386 AI accelerator, part of the Series3NX NNA cores.
"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."
With the Wujian 600 platform, developers can now run desktop-level applications, such as FireFox browser and LibreOffice built on OpenAnolis, an open-source Linux-based operating system launched by Alibaba in 2020. This marks a milestone for RISC-V based SoCs being used in high computing-demand scenarios, such as edge computing.
Collaboration with T-head’s ecosystem partners, such as OpenAnolis, will also lead to further optimisation of the software stacks on Wujian 600.
