A Hong Kong-invested chip start-up on Friday debuted a processor named after the city’s landmark mountain Lion Rock, a development that is set to elevate the city’s standing in the semiconductor landscape.
Advertisement
The RISC-V-based data centre chip from Shanghai semiconductor start-up StarFive – which received an undisclosed investment from the Hong Kong Investment Corporation (HKIC) in March – aims to take advantage of surging demand for computing power for artificial intelligence applications.
The company had received orders for the chip and would soon start mass production, it said on Friday.
StarFive founder and CEO Thomas Xu Tao said at a launch event in Hong Kong that the chip, which uses the RISC-V open-source architecture, was “independent and controllable”.
“Our objective right now is very clear: to make RISC-V a reality in the age of AI and to bring China’s chip innovations to the world,” he said.
Advertisement
The chip was compatible with Intel servers, and xFusion, a spin-off from Huawei Technologies, was among its first group of clients, the company said. XFusion was previously the x86 server unit under Huawei.
RISC-V, pronounced “risk five”, refers to the fifth generation of the Reduced Instruction Set Computer, an open-source central processing unit architecture that allows developers to configure their integrated circuit designs.