DAMO Academy Unveils Xuantie C950, Surpassing 70 Points in Performance

On March 24, at the 2026 Xuantie RISC-V Ecosystem Conference, Alibaba DAMO Academy officially unveiled its next-generation flagship processor, the Xuantie C950. Built on a 5nm process, the chip achieved a record-breaking score of over 70 points in the SPECint2006 benchmark test, with single-core performance exceeding 22 points per GHz. Operating at a maximum frequency of 3.2GHz, the C950 delivers more than three times the overall performance of its predecessor, the C920, positioning it as a competitive player in the mainstream server-grade processor market.

The Xuantie C950 integrates a self-developed AI acceleration engine, featuring a 4K ultra-wide Vector engine and a Matrix engine. These components are unified with the CPU architecture, eliminating data copying bottlenecks and enabling native convergence of general-purpose and AI computing power. The chip natively supports large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters, including Qwen3 and DeepSeek V3. Test results show that the C950 achieves an output speed of 34 tokens per second when running Qwen3, with a first-token latency of just 3.4 seconds. For the full-scale DeepSeek V3 model, the output speed reaches 18 tokens per second, with a first-token latency of 1.7 seconds. This marks the first time a RISC-V CPU has natively supported models of this scale, demonstrating the CPU's capability to handle complex reasoning and scheduling tasks in the AI agent era, thereby alleviating pressure on GPUs.

The Xuantie C950 supports all mandatory and optional extensions of the latest international RVA23.1 specification, ensuring seamless compatibility with mainstream operating systems such as Linux and Android. This paves the way for the chip’s deployment in high-end platforms, including servers, AI applications, and automotive systems. To date, DAMO Academy’s Xuantie series has introduced 16 RISC-V CPUs across the C, E, and R product lines, covering high-performance, high-efficiency, and high-reliability scenarios. These processors have been adopted in over 200 mass-produced chips and nearly 1,000 end products, spanning applications such as servers, robotics, new energy vehicles, industrial control, AI smart terminals, and storage controllers.

During the conference, DAMO Academy also released two RISC-V-native AI computing engines that work in synergy with the Xuantie CPU. The launch of the Xuantie C950 represents another significant milestone for the RISC-V architecture in the high-end CPU domain.