<span style="font-size:16px;">On October 19, at the 2021 Yunqi Conference, Zhang Jianfeng, President of Ali Cloud Intelligence and President of Dharma Institute, announced the open source of four Xuantie RISC-V series processors self-researched by its Pingtougo Semiconductor, and the opening of a series of tools and system software, which sparked great concern in the industry.</span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;">Core Intelligence conducted an interview with Jiangyi Meng, Vice President of Pintos Semiconductor, after the conference to unveil the in-depth layout and development vision of Ali and Pintos Semiconductor for the RISC-V ecosystem.</span> ### RISC-V is already the trend, with 62.4 billion RISC-V CPU cores to be shipped by 2025 <span style="font-size:16px;"> Although the X86 architecture is currently dominant in the PC and server markets, and the Arm architecture is dominant in the mobile market, they are both closed architecture systems. Although Arm provides IP licenses for its cores, it is difficult and expensive for downstream chip developers to develop Arm chips, and they cannot make any changes to the Arm IP cores as needed, lacking sufficient freedom and flexibility. This is not friendly to the IoT market, which has very fragmented requirements and is more sensitive to power and cost. Compared to the closed architectures of X86 and Arm, the RISC-V architecture is completely open, with many advantages such as instruction streamlining, modularity, scalability, open source, etc. Anyone can do development based on the RISC-V instruction set without restriction. Especially in recent years, the domestic demand for independent and controllable core chips is getting higher and higher. In this context, the open source RISC-V architecture, which meets the requirements of domestic independent and controllable, is becoming very popular among domestic manufacturers. In addition, more Chinese semiconductor manufacturers are actively conducting R&D based on the RISC-V architecture. According to the RISC-V Foundation, there are now over 2,000 members covering 70 countries. This compares to less than 200 members in 2018, which shows how rapidly RISC-V has grown in recent years. This is also due to the strong support from Chinese vendors. Currently, Chinese vendors account for nine of the RISC-V Foundation's top 14 members. These include Alibaba (Pinto Semiconductor), Huawei, ZTE, Safang Technology, ZTE, Simcom Computing, Institute of Software of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS), Institute of Computing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICT), and Becoming Capital. In addition, there are a large number of Chinese vendors among the strategic members of the RISC-V Foundation. </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;"> The RISC-V ecosystem has begun to flourish at an accelerated pace due to Chinese vendors, and this has attracted more and more international tier-one companies to join or make related arrangements. For example, Western Digital and Seagate have both launched their own RISC-V processors; SiFive, a well-known RISC-V CPU IP provider, has received a cumulative investment of over US$100 million in the past two years, with investors including Qualcomm, SK Hynix, Western Digital and other major companies. Even Wave Computing, the holder of the MIPS instruction set (renamed MIPS after a bankruptcy reorganisation), announced earlier this year that it would no longer design MIPS processors and would move to RISC-V-based chips. According to Semico Research, shipments of RISC-V CPU cores will reach 62.4 billion by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate of 146.2% from 2018-2025. This will be led by shipments of 16.7 billion cores in the industrial sector. </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> ### Accelerating the RISC-V ecological boom Ali Pingtou open source Xuantie series processors <span style="font-size:16px;"> Although the RISC-V instruction set is open source, and anyone can easily access it for development, it still requires a lot of investment in human, material and financial resources to develop a usable CPU from the moment you get it to the moment you develop your own. It is like building a house, even if you are provided with free cement and bricks, it does not necessarily mean that you can build a strong, durable and beautiful house. Therefore, in the RISC-V ecosystem, there are many vendors that specialise in providing CPU IP cores based on the RISC-V architecture, playing a role similar to that of Arm, mainly licensing CPU IP cores based on the RISC-V architecture to third-party chip designers, who can then quickly build their own designs based on these IP cores in combination with other related IPs. This is a bit like buying a rough house from a developer, you don't need to build it brick by brick, you just need to choose the house type and interior design. For example, the aforementioned Pinto Semiconductor, SiFive and CoreTech are all RISC-V CPU IP core providers. They offer RISC-V CPU IP core licensing or related design services to their customers. Since the official launch of the Xuantie 910, which is claimed to be the industry's most powerful high-performance RISC-V processor, at the "2019 Ali Cloud Summit" on July 25, 2019, Pingtou has launched Xuantie 902, 906, 907 and other RISC-V processors in the past two years. 907 and other RISC-V CPU IPs, covering various scenarios from low power consumption to high performance, supporting AliOS, FreeRTOS, RT-Thread, Linux, Android and other operating systems, and have been successfully applied to microcontrollers, industrial control, smart home appliances, smart grid, image processing, artificial intelligence, multimedia and automotive electronics. According to the latest published data, the Flatiron series processors have now shipped over 2.5 billion units, with over 150 customers and over 500 licenses. Why, at a time when the Xuantie series of processors is booming, is Pingtougo taking the initiative to break the industry's business model by open-sourcing its four mass-produced processor IPs, including the Xuantie E902, E906, C906 and C910, as well as the full-stack software and tools for the Xuantie based multi-operating system? </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;"> For an open architecture like RISC-V, a new more open model compared to traditional licensing is needed to better support innovation," Meng Jiangyi, vice president of Pinto Semiconductor, told CoreTech. Through our development in the past few years, we also feel that the power to drive RISC-V as an architecture by ourselves is still far from enough. So we hope that after we open it up today, we can let people do their own software and hardware adaptations on this, which will help the RISC-V architecture evolve to a deeper level of innovation and bring greater benefits to the whole industry." In semiconductor IP companies, apart from the head vendors such as Synopsys and Arm, it is not easy to make money in itself, let alone doing IP based on free and open source RISC-V. For Pinto, the simple IP licensing business itself does not cover the cost of the team either. Yet, IP is a very important part of the semiconductor industry, he can lower the threshold of innovation in the industry and help everyone reduce the difficulty and cost of chip development. This plays a very important role in driving the prosperity of the RISC-V ecosystem. Therefore, this is also the first part of Ali's layout after cutting into the semiconductor field. Meng Jiangyi said frankly: "For an ordinary IP company, all the returns need to come from IP licensing. But for the whole Ali system, we need to look at the whole cloud as one big ecology. We think the open source Xuantie processor is good for this big ecology, we will open source. The investment is not a problem, we are now investing so much, so we will not think in terms of traditional IP vendors. Ali has a strong ecological gene, and many things are considered from the starting point of shaping and influencing the ecology. Our ecology then needs more customised and pervasive chips to further promote the ecological prosperity of the cloud as one." It is understood that the open source Xuantie RISC-V CPU, while optimised for AliOS by default, will also support the mainstream FreeRTOS, RT-Thread, Linux and Android on the market. Therefore, developers are also free to choose their own. Meng Jiangyi emphasised that the open source of the Xuantie CPU is not just for Ali itself, but more for the whole community and the improvement of the infrastructure of the RISC-V ecosystem. "We first consider how RISC-V can be made more perfect, because more people have to come to do this, to bring down the cost of innovation. Then when the whole architecture matures, there will naturally be more demand for OS services that will run out of this track. I think when the whole ecology matures, Ali will definitely be one of the beneficiaries of this ecology." Meng Jiangyi explained to Core Intelligence. So, will the open source of the Flathead Xuantie RISC-V have an impact on RISC-V CPU IP vendors such as SiFive and CoreTech? In Meng's view, open source CUP cores are no longer a scarce resource in the RISC-V space, and there are already more than 110 CPU cores on the RISC-V website, many of which are open source. So, SiFive, the vendors, have been facing competition from open source RISC-V CPU cores. At the same time, they also face competition from other RISC-V CPU IP vendors with better design capabilities. But all of them are working together to promote the RISC-V ecosystem, contributing open source code to RISC-V, and there is a relationship of both competition and cooperation. This is the RISC-V ecosystem. Likewise, even if Pinto's open-sources the Genesis CPU, it will face competition from other open-source CPUs. "How to make these open source cores stable, reliable and continuously evolving, to promote the ecological integration of open source cores with open source software, and how to help customers use these open source cores and actually succeed in mass production is the key. We will subsequently strengthen the services we provide during the productisation process." Meng Jiangyi said. </span> ### Full-stack open source, fully empowering AIoT ecosystem <span style="font-size:16px;"> Thanks to the support of Ali's vast ecosystem, it seems that at the very beginning of its involvement in the RISC-V CPU IP core space, Ali had already planned to open source its RISC-V CPU IP cores and related designs to maximize the empowerment of the entire AIoT ecosystem. When Ali Pingtougo officially released its first RISC-V processor, Xuan Ti 910, in 2019, Dr. Qi Xiao Ning, Vice President of Alibaba Group, said, "The traditional model of general-purpose chips is increasingly difficult to adapt to the needs of fragmented AIoT scenarios, open source and openness are the general trend, and Pingtougo is committed to being a chip infrastructure provider in the AIoT era, lowering the the threshold for enterprises to design chips and make chips more universal." At that time, Ali also announced the "Inclusive Chip" plan. That is, Pintos would fully open up the IP Core of the Xuantie 910, and developers around the world could download the processor's code for free (at the time, it was open for FPGA code) and quickly carry out chip prototyping and architecture innovation based on it. Subsequently, in order to accelerate the development and design of chips based on the Xuantie CPU core, in August 2019, Pinto Semiconductor released "Wujian", a one-stop chip design platform for the AIoT era, which provides a total solution integrating chip architecture, basic software, algorithms and development tools, and can help chip design companies to design costs by 50% and compress design cycles by 50%. On 21 October 2019, at the 6th Wuzhen Internet Conference, Pinto Semiconductor also announced that it has officially open-sourced a low-power microcontroller (MCU) design platform based on the RISC-V architecture. On 29 May 2021, at the 2021 AliCloud Summit, Pingtougo Semiconductor launched three RISC-V development boards, based on the Xuantie 910, C906 and E906 processors, respectively, for high-performance, energy-efficient and low-power scenarios, which can support Android, Linux, AliOS Things and other operating systems, solving the RISC-V ec The scarcity of supporting software, hardware and tools further satisfies the needs of developers and enterprises. With this announcement, Flathead has open sourced four mass-produced processor IPs, including Xuantie E902, E906, C906 and C910, as well as full-stack software and tools based on Xuantie's multi-operating systems. So far, Pinto has spent more than three years to complete the full stack open source from Xuantie RISC-V CPU IP cores, to Xuantie based MCU design platforms, to Xuantie CPU based development boards, to open source EDA tools and system software, which is fully open, transparent and inclusive around the whole chain of RISC-V ecology, realizing Ali's initial set goal. At this Yunqi Conference, Zhang Jianfeng, President of Ali Cloud Intelligence and President of Dharma Institute, also announced, "In the future, we will open source more RISC-V processors, and we also hope to have more partners to develop more valuable IP cores and basic software based on Xuantie, so as to jointly build an open, transparent and inclusive RISC-V ecology. " </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;"> During the Frontier Computing Breakthrough Forum during the Cloud Computing Conference, Fan Yibo, a professor at Fudan University, also revealed that its AI-based XK-ISP jointly developed with Dharma Academy will be followed by an open source ISP IP Core version. In the interview, Meng also further revealed to Core Intelligence that in addition to the Xuantie RISC-V CPU IP, Pingtou will continue to invest in R&D on some other core IPs, and also plan to cooperate with some commercial IP companies to let them also launch open source versions of their IPs for the Xuantie RISC-V ecology (which Pingtou will also help them to implement silicon validation), together to promote the development of open source. </span> ### About the future of RISC-V <span style="font-size:16px;"> The advantages of the RISC-V architecture are that it is very lean, has a very good energy efficiency ratio, is free and open source, is highly customisable, can be easily extended and has a lower overall cost, which makes it more suitable for the IoT market which requires high customisation, energy efficiency and cost. RISC-V has already achieved good results in the IoT market. As the RISC-V architecture continues to evolve, and as more and more chip vendors and upstream and downstream industry chain vendors join, will RISC-V have the opportunity to enter new markets with higher performance requirements, such as mobile terminals, automobiles and PCs/servers, and compete head-to-head with Intel and Arm? From the roadmap published by the RISC-V Foundation, the current RISC-V instruction set already supports 64-bit and more cores, which will lead to a significant increase in performance, in addition to strengthening support for Linux systems and AI compilers in software. Meng also said that performance is currently not a bottleneck preventing RISC-V from entering other markets. If you want to improve cluster performance, then it's time to do parallel scaling, as RISC-V can now achieve a maximum bit width of 2048 bits. "RISC-V to enter other markets, the biggest problem at the moment is that there is not built out an upper layer of software ecology, this is a lesson that must be made up, and after the lesson is made up he has to innovate to be able to have a chance." On the mobile side, although Google has not been officially providing hardware-based Android compilation support for the open source RISC-V ISA, in January this year, Flathead has managed to run Android on the Xuantie RISC-V hardware and open source the relevant code. This also means that RISC-V will hopefully follow into the mobile market in the future. "Our initial intention in going to run Android was to see if RISC-V could take the strain of very interactive applications like browsers and Java. android's software stack is thick and we needed to further explore the limits of the RISC-V architecture's integrity and capabilities by porting him." Meng Jiangyi revealed, "Through continuous testing and optimization, it is now possible to run Android smoothly and run web multimedia without problems at the moment, and a better version is expected to be launched at the end of this year or early next year." Also on the server side, chip startup Esperanto last year launched its self-developed ET-SoC-1 processor with more than 1,000 RISC-V cores integrated into a single chip, mainly for large-scale machine learning applications on the server side. AliCloud's server-oriented Feitian OS is also fully compatible with X86, ARM and RISC-V architectures. We all know that the advantages of RISC-V are streamlined instructions, scalability, open source and free of charge, but if RISC-V goes in an increasingly "heavy" direction in the future, it may become more and more like Arm, and some of its original advantages may be weakened. So how should we compete with them then? If RISC-V is chosen in the market, I think it has to have the ability to enter the industry. If there is no demand in that market, even if you go in, it is useless. To say that RISC-V has a competitive advantage in entering new markets, it is that the new architecture is expected to go completely out of the box in new markets, and its global parallel development model enables RISC-V to adapt to innovation more quickly. </span> ---