Chipmakers supplying Chinese carmakers have a new domestic RISC-V option for safety controllers and gateways that DAMO says meets ASIL-D, the strictest automotive safety level.
Alibaba’s DAMO Academy has released the XuanTie E908A, a processor design aimed at the safety-critical electronics in cars. DAMO unveiled the design on October 19 at the RISC-V China Summit in Shenzhen, Jiemian reported, describing it as the first RISC-V CPU design to meet both the ASIL-B and ASIL-D functional-safety levels. ASIL-D is the strictest of the automotive functional-safety levels. Jiemian also reported a single-point fault metric above 90%, a measure of how many hardware faults the design catches, without saying which safety level that figure applies to.
The E908A is processor IP, a design that chipmakers license and build into their own chips. DAMO is targeting safety islands, the parts of a vehicle’s electronics dedicated to monitoring for faults, as well as domain controllers and vehicle gateways, according to TechNode. DAMO did not disclose a clock speed, manufacturing process or availability date, and it named no carmakers or chip companies as licensees.
At the same event DAMO published its first product roadmap for autonomous driving and embodied AI. The headline item is the C950A, a high-performance automotive processor based on its C950 server design, targeting five times the performance of existing RISC-V automotive products.
XuanTie has scaled in low-end chips and now targets cars and servers
RISC-V is an open instruction set, the basic language a processor understands, that any company can build on. Chips built on XuanTie processor designs have shipped more than 6 billion units in total, across smart devices and server peripherals. The figure comes from Semiconductor Industry Insights, the trade publication whose report TechNode cited, which said DAMO is now expanding XuanTie into server CPUs and autonomous driving.
DAMO is now pushing into more demanding markets. Its C950, launched in Shanghai on March 24, runs at up to 3.2GHz and became the first RISC-V CPU to score above 70 on the single-core SPECint2006 benchmark, Xinhua reported. The South China Morning Post, which Alibaba owns, reported that DAMO chief scientist Meng Jianyi put its performance at more than three times that of the earlier C920.
Semiconductor Industry Insights reported that the C950 runs Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Flash-Next at 43 tokens a second and DeepSeek V4-Flash at 38 tokens a second, and that DAMO, the Beijing Institute of Open Source Chip and ZTE Microelectronics have achieved a 30% gain from running two threads per core. The C950A would bring that design into cars; the trade publication said it understood the chip is expected by the end of 2027.
DAMO now runs XuanTie after Alibaba reshuffled its chip units
XuanTie began as a product line of T-Head, Alibaba’s chip unit, which released the C908 in 2022. In February, 36Kr reported that Alibaba had split its chip businesses, moving the XuanTie and Hanguang teams into DAMO, keeping its GPU work inside Alibaba Cloud and leaving T-Head to focus on server chips for Alibaba’s cloud infrastructure. Xinhua, the South China Morning Post and Yicai all attributed this year’s XuanTie releases to DAMO.
Software support has followed. In May, the XuanTie 9 series completed adaptation to Android 16, making it the first processor compatible with the RVA23 RISC-V profile to run the latest Android, Yicai reported. Semiconductor Industry Insights said DAMO has contributed more than half of the RISC-V code in the OpenJDK Java community.
Meng was candid about what comes next. Speaking in Shenzhen, he said that after winning a place in the market, the question is which competitors RISC-V chips can actually beat in specific contests, according to Semiconductor Industry Insights. He added that high-performance RISC-V needs sustained hardware and software development and engineering validation, beyond flagship products, before it reaches mass production.
Carmakers already have in-house RISC-V efforts
Other Chinese groups are also working on RISC-V car chips. Semiconductor Industry Insights listed RISC-V automotive chip work at Great Wall Motor, Dongfeng and JAC affiliates, alongside Infineon, without describing any of them as DAMO partners. EastFrontier has followed the RISC-V push in data centers, including a reported funding round for a RISC-V server chip test.
The signal to watch is the first named licensee for the E908A or a carmaker’s chip that uses it, followed by whether the C950A arrives on the end-2027 timetable the trade press expects.