“In 2016, I participated in the RISC-V Summit for the first time in Shanghai, which was more academic conference. Everyone thought it might be a "fashionable" technology, and the participants were more scholars and teachers. Nearly seven years have passed. At this conference this year, the composition of the staff has changed a lot. Many of the people here are enterprises, and many are companies that are really mass producing RISC-V chips. " On March 2, Meng Jianyi, vice president of Pingtouge, told reporters of the Daily Economic News at a media communication meeting.
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The scene of the first black iron RISC-V ecological conference was photographed by reporter Chen Ting
In addition to these changes, his biggest feeling is that "the big trend is from academic technology to commercialization. It has really moved from technology to products, from simple love to commercialization."
After about five years of construction, China's RISC-V ecosystem has begun to take shape. Some changes are taking place.
On the same day, the first Dark Iron RISC-V Ecological Conference hosted by Alibaba Pingtouge was held in Shanghai. At the meeting, Ni Guangnan, an academician of the CAE Member, also said in his speech that in recent years, the open source RISC-V architecture, which was developed under the leadership of Professor David Patterson, a Turing Prize winner, at Berkeley, California, has created a new situation for the global chip industry to break the monopoly, lower the threshold for chip development, promote chip talent training, and promote innovation in the chip industry, and also provided new opportunities for the development of the Chinese chip industry.
"It is no exaggeration to say that today RISC-V is the most popular architecture in China's CPU sector. China's chip industry and the entire chip ecosystem will increasingly focus on RISC-V architecture, and China's huge market will become an important base to support RISC-V." Ni Guangnan said.
**A thriving RISC-V ecosystem**
Ni Guangnan said that RISC-V ecology is growing vigorously, mainly in three aspects: software ecology, application ecology and developer ecology.
In terms of software ecology, Ni Guangnan said that at present RISC-V has a good compatibility with the international mainstream RTOS, Linux, Android and other operating systems. In China, various operating system manufacturers, such as Kirin, Unitrust, Dragon lizard, Hongmeng, Kukai and so on, are fully supporting.
In terms of application ecology, RISC-V was first applied in the IoT field, and is gradually moving towards a broader application field. Ni Guangnan introduced that RISC-V can not only be popularized in industrial control, Internet of Things, smart home and other fields with low requirements for computing power, but also is developing into desktop applications, edge computing and other fields with higher requirements for computing power; The field of ICV is considered to be a huge market for chips in the future.
He said: "It is estimated that an intelligent connected vehicle may use hundreds of CPUs. At present, China's major industrial alliances in this field are actively promoting solutions based on RISC-V. With the development of servers and supercomputers, AI training and inference, including ChatGPT and other applications, the demand for powerful computing power is increasingly urgent. Given the advantages of RISC-V, such as modularity, scalability, and easy customization, as well as being free from monopoly constraints, and easy to ensure supply chain security China's relevant manufacturers are fully promoting the RISC-V solution with strong computing power.
In terms of developer ecology, hundreds of enterprises in China have joined RISC-V International Foundation. It is reported that at present, the open community of Pingtouge chip has more than 100000 developers, which has promoted the ecological development of RISC-V.
The data shows that in 2022, 10 billion processors with RISC-V architecture have been shipped, and the data predicts that it will exceed 80 billion by 2025.
David Patterson, the father of RISC-V and the winner of the Turing Prize, also joined the conference. Regarding the vigorous development of RISC-V ecology, he said at the conference: "RISC-V is a global phenomenon, with developers from more than 60 countries studying it. In Asia, many well-known enterprises, academic institutions and industry associations have actively participated in it. From embedded systems to various types of computers, and finally to mainframe computers." David Patterson believes that after three to five years, RISC-V will be everywhere.
It is worth mentioning that the vigorous development of RISC-V ecology calls for the unification of instruction set standards. The reporter learned that Chinese enterprises have played a key role in promoting the construction of RISC-V international standards. Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International Foundation, said at the meeting that 12 of the 22 senior members of the foundation were from China. In the construction of international standards, Pingtouge led 11 major technical groups and promoted the formulation of standards in 29 technical directions
**“The chip is not urgent”**
At the 2018 Yunqi Conference held in Hangzhou in September 2018, Zhang Jianfeng, the CTO of Alibaba and the president of the Dharma Academy, said that in the middle of next year, Alibaba will produce the first neural network chip with various indicators that are the world's leading, and build a real quantum chip in two or three years.
Zhang Jianfeng announced at that time that Alibaba would set up "Pingtouge Semiconductor Co., Ltd." to engage in the self-development and strategic layout of chips. The Dharma Institute will build a chip strategy with AliNPU smart chips and embedded chips as the core, taking the newly established "Pingtouge Semiconductor Co., Ltd." as the core.
According to public information, in February this year, Pingtouge (Shanghai) Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. underwent industrial and commercial changes, and its registered capital increased from 10 million yuan to 300 million yuan, an increase of 2900%.
RISC-V chip ecosystem and operating system and other basic software ecosystem are accelerating integration. At the meeting, the reporter learned that Pingtouge has basically completed the full adaptation of international and domestic mainstream operating systems with RISC-V, including Android, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Dragon monitor, Unitrust, openKylin, Skyworth Kukai, RTT and other operating systems. This means that RISC-V is fully capable of undertaking software applications through different operating systems such as cloud, desktop and terminal, and the upper application developer can smoothly achieve architecture compatibility with 0 code.
At the media communication meeting, Meng Jianyi said that the complete adaptation of the mainstream operating system solved the "roadblock" of the entire RISC-V to various application scenarios. "Today, RISC-V, as the CPU architecture, must be supported by the operating system."
It is worth mentioning that in his speech, Ni Guangnan called on the Chinese industry to work closely together to build the RISC-V software ecosystem and promote the development of RISC-V to high-end applications as soon as possible on the basis of the well-established open source community in China.
Meng Jianyi also expressed his views on this in an interview with reporters.
"Scale and benchmarking are very important for RISC-V." Meng Jianyi said, "If only scale is available, people always think that it may be low end, or even can't be high end. Today, the high end is also constantly trying." He said that Pingtou has made a layout in the high-end direction, but there is a research and development cycle. "What Pingtou can do is to promote RISC-V to be high-end and high-performance, but there is a process."
With regard to the issue of "how to make breakthroughs in Chinese chips", which is highly concerned by the outside world, Meng Jianyi said that breakthroughs in technological capabilities and market development are prerequisites
In the speech that day, Meng Jianyi expressed a positive attitude.
"RISC-V is like the rising sun. Although it is still as warm as jade, it has initially illuminated the east. We have also seen some tracks. We are waiting for the day when the sun is burning."
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