<div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;"> December 9 - The market for RISC-V instruction sets will double in size in 2022 compared to 2021, and will double again by 2023 as the potential market available for RISC-V instruction sets continues to expand, Deloitte Global, a leading consultancy, recently predicted. The RISC-V instruction set market size could reach nearly US$800 million in 2023, up from nearly US$400 million in 2021, and is expected to be close to US$1 billion by 2024. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;">▲Deloitte forecasts change in RISC-V market size from 2018 to 2025</span> <span style="font-size:16px;"> First announced in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley, RISC-V is an open source alternative to proprietary processor instruction sets such as Arm and x86. Anyone is free to build chips based on the RISC-V instruction set, which can themselves be open or closed source, and anyone can modify or extend the architecture to suit their needs. Deloitte predicts that the RISC-V instruction set could evolve into the wave of the future, but it will struggle to shake Arm and the x86 ISA (instruction set architecture) for nearly 10 years. </span> ### I. Free and flexible, the best alternative to Arm and x86 <span style="font-size:16px;"> In recent years, Intel and Arm's proprietary instruction set architectures have made up almost all CPUs deployed worldwide, and RISC-V, an open source instruction set architecture for chip design, has become an alternative to Arm and x86 ISAs. The open source nature of RISC-V offers several advantages over proprietary ISAs. Firstly, it is free, which can save companies in the early stages of development millions of dollars in licensing fees, and secondly, as an open source instruction set architecture, RISC-V is not subject to export restrictions. This is attractive to companies that are affected by these restrictions. On a technical level, RISC-V designs are easier to modify than traditional ISAs and are also compatible with a wide range of applications, allowing for greater flexibility. While some still believe that RISC-V may face challenges across ecosystems, some companies are using the RISC-V instruction set for all AI image sensors, security management, AI computing and machine control systems for 5G, with others similarly planning to use it for different storage, graphics and machine learning applications. Even Intel's Foundry Services division is working with RISC-V processor solutions company SiFive. It should be noted, however, that RISC-V technology is still relatively new and may not be available to all customers. Secondly, because the technology is still in its early stages of development, there are few high-profile design achievements that lack some of the features of Arm or x86 ISAs. In addition, manufacturing chips based on the RISC-V instruction set in a foundry is not very different in materials from manufacturing traditional ISA-based closed chips, and the manufacturing technology is the same. Even by 2025, sales of Intel x86 and Arm chips are likely to be many times larger than sales of chips based on the RISC-V instruction set. </span> ### II. Over 23% of startups adopt it, widely favoured by Chinese companies <span style="font-size:16px;"> So, who will be the effective users of RISC-V technology? Deloitte believes that different enterprises are considering different claims for choosing RISC-V. </span> #### 1. Chinese chip industry: fear of losing mainstream licenses and reducing import dependence <span style="font-size:16px;"> Due to the recent US sanctions, Chinese chip development companies are concerned about whether they will continue to be able to license x86 or Arm ISAs. Even if trade policy changes in the future, Chinese companies already understand that there is always a chance that the "ISA carpet" will be pulled out from under them. RISC-V technology could give them a way around such restrictions, allowing Chinese companies to reduce their reliance on chip imports. For years, China has been working to become more self-sufficient in the manufacture of chips. As of 8 May 2020, the RISC-V Foundation has 193 members, 33 of which are from China, accounting for 17 per cent. In July this year, at the first RISC-V China Summit, the Chinese Academy of Sciences released a home-made open source high-performance RISC-V processor core, Xiangshan. </span> #### 2. Chip startups: ISA costs rise as over 23% of startups adopt RISC-V <span style="font-size:16px;"> Deloitte predicts that venture capitalists will invest around $22 billion in various chip startups over the three years from 2020 to 2022. To put that in perspective, that's more than the $21 billion they invested in the entire 11-year period from 2005 to 2016. The cost of Arm licensing ISAs is currently rising, by millions of dollars. Because Intel has not historically licensed to companies other than AMD and IC design firm VIA Electronics (Via), its ISA licensing costs are not publicly available, but x86 licensing costs could also run into the millions of dollars. For the world's largest smartphone company, millions of dollars in licensing fees may not be worth much, but for a startup with relatively little cash, millions of dollars would be a significant outlay. As a result, according to a 2020 study, more than 23% of startups have dedicated chip ASICs and semi-custom circuit FPGA chips that integrate at least one RISC-V processor. </span> #### 3, AI chip industry: data centre underlying engine, in line with dedicated characteristics <span style="font-size:16px;"> Many of the new AI chip designs are using RISC-V technology. Interestingly, some predict that the technology will not be used in the data centre in the near future. RISC-V is currently gaining less momentum in the data centre and it is currently often used as the underlying engine for various accelerators. AI chip startup Tenstorrent, for example, will produce a RISC-V-based reasoning chip. But another group believes that AI chips could bring RISC-V to the data centre market sooner than expected. siFive, a RISC-V processor solutions company, says they have developed some custom IP based on RISC-V that customers can use to build their own accelerators, which could allow data centres to move towards more dedicated rather than general-purpose models. </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;"> ▲RISC-V based chip developed by SiFive (image courtesy of Data Center Knowledge) </span> #### 4. Automotive and IoT market: 2.9 billion sales by 2025, huge market potential <span style="font-size:16px;"> In 2020, sales of chips based on RISC-V technology reach 4 million units in the serviceable market (SAM) in the automotive sector, which is expected to increase to 150 million units by 2022 and 2.9 billion units by 2025. As a result, in April this year, Renesas Electronics Corporation, a leading supplier of semiconductor solutions, and SiFive entered into a partnership to jointly develop next-generation high-end RISC-V solutions for automotive applications. </span> <div style="width:100%;text-align:center;">  </div> <span style="font-size:16px;"> ▲Renesas Electronics and SiFive in strategic partnership (image courtesy of Renesas) Chips in cars tend to be less powerful than data centre CPUs, so success in vehicles may provide lessons for RISC-V in other IoT markets. Due to the open source nature of RISC-V, many practitioners are starting to get into the fold. This, coupled with the fact that the country is accelerating self-sufficiency in the chip industry due to tensions between the US and China, are driving the development of RISC-V technology. </span> ### III. RISC-V sales in the PC market to reach 300 million by 2022 <span style="font-size:16px;"> Compared to the RISC-V technology stakeholders mentioned above, the PC chip market, and semiconductor foundries are likely to pay less attention to the technology. In the short term, the PC chip market is unlikely to shift significantly to RISC-V technology. Although some countries are currently interested in designing RISC-V-based PC chips, they have set few target sales compared to other PC chips. For example, China is planning to use RISC-V technology to build laptops that support a variety of open source browsers and produce 2,000 PCs by the end of 2022, and Russia plans to sell 60,000 new PC processors based on RISC-V cores by 2025. However, these targets are small compared to the global PC market of around 300 million units sold annually in 2020. Nevertheless, Deloitte predicts that the market opportunity for RISC-V-based chips in PCs that can be served will be close to 300 million by 2022. For semiconductor foundries, although ISAs are not important to them, RISC-V, with its lower cost and greater flexibility, could lead to an explosion in new chip designs. Hundreds of new chips may need to be manufactured by foundries, and any potential boom in new chip designs will benefit semiconductor manufacturers, even if production of that chip is low at first. Finally, there is no reason for Intel or Arm to worry about RISC-V encroaching on their chip business anytime soon. Currently it can cost chip developers millions of dollars to obtain an ISA license from Intel or Arm, and reducing the cost of ISA licensing alone is unlikely to be a significant consideration in their adoption of RISC-V. Now that sales of smartphones or other consumer electronics are growing dramatically, the demand for chips continues to surge. Add to this the multiple costs associated with chip development and manufacturing: design, verification, software, manufacturing, etc., and if the first design contains errors, it must be started again from scratch. All in all, making a new chip with a relatively cutting-edge design could cost more than $500 million in 2022, which is a drop in the bucket compared to spending a few million dollars using off-the-shelf technology. </span> ### Conclusion: RISC-V will hardly match x86 and Arm in the short term <span style="font-size:16px;"> In the future, it is still uncertain whether RISC-V technology will gain a foothold in an industry dominated by two large, established players. Currently, the instruction set architecture space is dominated by two giants, Arm and Intel, with only a few companies occupying niches in the space, such as processor IP providers ARC and Tensilica. Arm and Intel's other competitors have disappeared, and their disappearance is due to the urgent need for the technology industry to consolidate ISA technology. Deloitte predicts that the instruction set architecture for CPUs is likely to remain with only two major players in the next decade: Intel and Arm. Since its introduction, RISC-V technology has been making waves in the processor space with its open-source nature. Those who are optimistic about the technology believe that RISC-V will rival Intel and Arm's mainstream chip instruction sets and become the third major technology standing alongside them. But as RISC-V technology is in the early stages of development, it is still struggling to dominate the market in ecologically mature industries such as mobile phones and tablets. </span> ---