<div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">    *<span style="font-size:16px;">High energy ahead, up to 3,730 words in total</span>*  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;"> In 2010, a team at the University of California, Berkeley was about to start a project to design a CPU, but hit a snag in the process of selecting an instruction set. Looking at the instruction sets on the market at the time: x86 was unavailable for licensing in Intel's hands; ARM was too expensive to license; and as for MIPS, PowerPC, SPARC, etc., not only were they inherently complex, they also had many intellectual property issues. So the team decided to take matters into their own hands. They set up a four-person team and completed a new instruction set in just three months, and publicly released their results. This new instruction set, RISC-V, can be said to have been created to replace ARM or x86 in terms of its origins. We can see the growth of arm in the past 10 years. With the development of smart phones, arm is not only widely used in various smart devices, but also began to work in PCs and data centers in recent years, which has the potential to erode the share of X86's traditional advantageous fields. Similarly, it has been 10 years since the birth of risc-v. since the establishment of risc-v foundation in 2015, its open source feature has attracted major technology giants to join and grow rapidly. At the risc-v summit held on December 8 last year, Calista Redmond, CEO of risc-v foundation, said that from embedded to enterprise, the market momentum of risc-v core, SOC, development board, software and tools is increasing. At the same time, Redmond also revealed that in 2020, the global membership of risc-v foundation doubled to more than 900 members, including 215 organizations. For the market performance in 2020, Zhang Xianyi, CEO of perfxlab (pengfeng Technology), said in an interview with Huaqiang Electronics: "2020 is a small climax of domestic innovation of computing hardware technology, and our development momentum is also very good. We believe that China's innovation and power of the new generation of computing technology can not be ignored." </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;"> According to Zhang Xianyi, perfxlab is a company dedicated to the research and development of technologies related to computing software stack. Its core team comes from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and focuses on the three new generation computing technology directions of HPC, risc-v and AI. As early as 2018, perfxlab took the lead in joining the risc-v foundation. At this stage, risc-v-based chips are mainly used in Internet of things scenarios, such as edge computing, embedded FPGA, MCU and other low-end markets with low performance requirements. In the past, these application scenarios were also good at arm. Taking 32-bit MCU as an example, many domestic MCU manufacturers have long relied on the ecological environment established by arm. The emergence of risc-v makes domestic manufacturers smell the new road outside arm. Li Yue pointed out that at present, the wide application of risc-v processor is impacting the arm market, and many large domestic chip manufacturers have been actively laying out the products of risc-v processor core. Although risc-v does not have many applications in the field of 64 bit and other high-performance processors, according to Zhang Xianyi, the success in the field of 32-bit processors is enough to reflect the advantages of risc-v over arm. "First, it is two different things to explain the complexity of the system and the advanced nature of the system," Zhang explained. "Although the technical complexity of 32-bit processor is lower than that of 64 bit processor, it is still not easy to do well and be advanced. Risc-v took the lead in making gratifying achievements in the 32-bit processor market, which has reflected the advantages of risc-v open source instruction set. Perfxlab has always said that the driving force of open source is to enable the industry to obtain 'freedom of design', which is also the core advantage compared with arm Potential. We think risc-v 32-bit processor has great potential. We can know something by comparing our scale with international giants such as st and NXP. " However, for the future huge IOT market, its fragmentation characteristics have been discussed in the industry for many years. Using its first mover advantage, arm has built an Internet of things cloud platform with its multiple ecological partners in an attempt to solve the fragmentation problem during IOT deployment. As a challenger, will the fragmentation of IOT market hinder the promotion and implementation of risc-v? Zhang Xianyi once again stressed the need to give full play to the open source features of risc-v: "You can get 'freedom of design'. From the perspective of chip design, this first means these advantages: freedom of innovation with lower threshold; freedom of extreme design; freedom from being controlled by others. Perfxlab will give full support to chip hardware enterprises in risc-v open source software ecology, enabling the last mile from chip to application landing." Therefore, open source software ecology is the key to solve the problem of fragmentation. "To make everything intelligent, the chip must be diversity, and this is spring," Zhang Xianyi added. </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;"> CPU localization has been the difficulty and focus of China's information technology application innovation and development for many years, but so far, domestic CPU manufacturers led by godson, Hisilicon and Feiteng have adopted the form of foreign IP authorization. At least in high-performance applications such as PC and smart phone, mature and completely autonomous and controllable CPU products almost do not exist. Against this background, Li Jiajie, vice chairman of the all China Federation of industry and commerce, said at this year's two sessions: "The rise of open source chip technology has brought opportunities for China to 'overtake in the corner'. In recent two years, risc-v open source architecture is becoming a global trend of chip industry innovation. Based on this flexible and open source architecture, China's chip industry can have the opportunity to compete with European and American chip companies on the same starting line. Risc-v is expected to become an important option for CPU localization." However, in the short term, there is still a long way for risc-v to reach the level of replacing arm and x86. After all, arm and x86 have a development history of decades, and the ecological barriers created by the company behind them can not be crossed day by day. So can risc-v really bear the high expectations of domestic CPUs? </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;"> In January this year, Alibaba's pingtouge semiconductor company transplanted the Android 10 operating system to the processor and hardware using xuantie 910 risc-v core and ran successfully, which seems to let us see the possibility of risc-v replacing arm on smart phones. </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;"> It is worth mentioning that perfxlab is one of the in-depth participants of the flat head c910 running Android system project. Zhang Xianyi analyzed the significance of Android running successfully on risc-v processor from two aspects of technology and business: "From the technical level, this proves that risc-v 64bit processor will not be absent in high performance, and will compete with arm in this field in the future; from the commercial level, whether risc-v + Android can make great progress in the future may be closely related to Google's support." On the other hand, adapting Android may just be a signal, a signal that can prove the ability of risc-v. from a longer-term perspective, Zhang Xianyi told reporters: "in the future, which market will be bigger for one mobile phone and all things intelligent and all things interconnected? Linux ecology, Huawei Hongmeng, apple and Google are actually actively laying out the next generation of all things interconnected operating system." "The reason why Apple chose arm and Google chose arm was not that arm chose IOS and Android." Zhang Xianyi further explained. "Therefore, as risc-v hardware, ironing needs its own hardware. Risc-v hardware must first prove your ability, which may be the key significance of this problem." In fact, from the development process of arm, we can also find that after more than ten years of development since its birth in 1985, it did not gradually realize monopoly in the mobile phone market until about 2000 due to the explosive growth of mobile phones. Up to now, arm's IP has developed from the initial low-performance and low-power products to monopolizing the current smart phone SOC market, and gradually expanded to PCs, data centers, etc 86. Impact on traditional advantageous markets. From low-end quantitative change to high-end qualitative change, this may also be the only way for risc-v to break through the market monopoly of arm and x86. After adapting Android to prove the plasticity and high-performance potential of risc-v, whether the next generation operating system can choose risc-v still needs the efforts of risc-v ecological manufacturers to jointly build stronger hardware and better ecology. </span> <div style="font-size:16px;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;"> Like other instruction set architectures, risc-v's chips are also divided into general purpose (CPU / MCU) and special purpose (SOC). Among them, whether the general chip can be widely used, perfect ecology is the most critical factor. "At present, the domestic risc-v ecological chain is very healthy." Li Jue analyzed: "players participate in various business links such as processor core providers, embedded system providers, embedded software developers, chip manufacturers and solution providers, and some fields have formed obvious leadership advantages." Zhang Xianyi also expressed optimistic views on the technical ecology in the development of risc-v: "We are in the era of AI technology transformation, and a new ecology is being established. Who can realize the iterative closed loop from new technology to application to ecological construction will have the future. On the other hand, China's leading advantage in the Internet era provides the best soil for this closed loop. If we establish a social consensus and give priority to domestic technology, it will be accelerated This process. " When asked whether risc-v has the potential to reach the current market position of arm in the future, Zhang Xianyi thought that this often involves whether the technological change is regular and the industrial environment. He said that from the macro level of industrial development, there are three key points: 1、 According to Moore's law, the IC industry itself is a high-speed iterative industry, but its advantages are often disadvantages. For example, the instruction set needs to be forward compatible and becomes more and more complex; 2、 Behind all technologies are talents, patents can be locked, and talents are mobile and sustainable; 3、 Whether China has made enough and sustained investment in this industry. If we want to be a landlord, we must have the spirit of opening up wasteland. In the era of the transformation of the new generation of computing technology, as long as we have the spirit of opening up wasteland, technology will not be a problem. Li Yu also expressed the key of talents in the development of risc-v industry. "Whether the industry can continue to develop depends on the icing on the cake of education. In the next step, in addition to looking for leading customers in the fields to be developed, we should actively promote the integration of production, teaching and research of risc-v, promote risc-v through education and provide engineers with quality and quantity, forming a virtuous circle." Meanwhile, on the way to promote the development of risc-v industry, Li Yu also said: "In addition to increasing R & D efforts on high-performance processor cores, xinlai technology has also started the construction of a full stack SOC IP platform based on risc-v processor cores, which can greatly reduce the design cycle of projects based on risc-v and reduce the design cost. At the same time, it can help customers output core-based IP in the fields of automobile, industrial control, communication, smart home, blockchain, artificial intelligence, etc Nuclear products. " As a deep participant in the Android porting risc-v project of pingtouge, perfxlab is also creating a more convenient development environment for developers. Zhang Xianyi said: "Based on our core advantages in computing software stack, perfxlab will grow together with computing hardware technology companies in the fields of HPC and risc-v. our perfxapi open source heterogeneous computing software stack is oriented to the high-performance heterogeneous computing needs of cloud and edge, and provides a unified and open computing software platform for all kinds of computing hardware. On the one hand, it allows computing hardware to fully develop in different scenarios Use computing power to make it easier for developers to use various computing hardware platforms. As risc-v is an emerging instruction set, we launched the rvboards open source software project, hoping to provide a complete open SDK for each risc-v SOC and contribute to talent training and application innovation through the developer and enthusiast community. " </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;">Therefore, it is not difficult to see that under the "open source halo", risc-v has attracted the attention of major domestic industrial chain manufacturers. In China's future chip independent and controllable strategy, risc-v is highly expected, which is also closely related to its own application potential. At present, we are at the key node of entering the real era of Internet of all things. Just as the emergence of IOS and Android more than 10 years ago completely subverted the smartphone industry, domestic risc-v ecological manufacturers must seize the current opportunity to jointly promote the development of local risc-v industry. Perhaps we can expect that the next 10 years will be the era of risc-v.</span> ---