A team from China’s top government research academy pledged to produce this year a processor based on the open-source chip-design architecture RISC-V, as Beijing advances its semiconductor self-reliance drive amid escalating US restrictions.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) will be able to deliver its XiangShan open-source central processing unit in 2025, wrote Bao Yungang, deputy director at the academy’s Institute of Computing Technology, in a Weibo post on Sunday.

Initiated by the CAS in 2019, the XiangShan project aims to develop high-performance open-source processors. During a presentation at the Hot Chips 2024 semiconductor conference in Silicon Valley in August, the CAS research team described XiangShan’s goal as eventually becoming “the Linux of processors”.

Bao, who is also the secretary general of the China Open Command Ecology (RISC-V) Alliance, said the team strives to break the traditional perception that open source means low performance and low quality. It also wants to prove that an open-source project initiated by academia can result in scalable applications.

XiangShan is part of China’s growing efforts to adopt RISC-V, an open-source chip architecture that lets developers configure and customise their designs. Chinese developers are hoping that RISC-V, pronounced “risk five”, can help them reduce reliance on foreign suppliers amid an intensifying tech war with the US.

Adopters include Alibaba Group Holding’s chip design unit T-Head, which in November 2023 released a RISC-V-based controller integrated-circuit that it planned to initially deploy in Alibaba Cloud’s data centres. Alibaba owns the Post.

The XiangShan project drew recent attention after US hacker and software engineer George Hotz last week wrote on X, asking, “Why is the top performing open-source CPU (XiangShan) Chinese? Where’s the American project to beat this?”

That post, which attracted more than 524,000 views, has led to a mild uptick in the number of stars on XiangShan’s GitHub page, according to Bao.

While US politicians have reportedly been looking at restricting RISC-V since 2023, regulatory options for the country to maintain its leadership in the field are “limited”, according to a report from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in November. That is because the non-profit body managing the standard, RISC-V International, operates outside the US.

XiangShan has so far completed tape-outs – the final design stage of a new chip – for two versions of its processors: Yanqihu in 2021 and Nanhu in 2023, with the third-generation Kinminghu in progress, according to the project’s website.

Still, the team acknowledged on the website that “a big gap” still existed between XiangShan processors and the “mainstream industry level”.