In the current CPU market, x86 architecture and Arm architecture are still the most mainstream instruction set architecture in the world. Among them, x86 architecture dominates the PC and server market, while ARM architecture almost completely monopolizes the mobile market. The popular RISC-V architecture in recent years, thanks to its advantages of simplicity, modularity, scalability, and open source, has also quickly established its foothold in the Internet of Things market, which is more sensitive to power consumption and cost, and has begun to continue to develop towards the high-performance market, with a great potential to compete with x86 and ARM.

According to the latest data released by the global open standards organization RISC-V International, the RISC-V International community has achieved impressive growth milestones and technological progress in the past year. Among them, the number of members of RISC-V International increased by more than 26% year on year, with more than 3180 members in 70 countries/regions. Today, there are more than 10 billion RISC-V cores in the market, and tens of thousands of engineers worldwide are committed to the RISC-V program.

It is noteworthy that Chinese enterprises account for nearly half of the 3180 members of RISC-V Foundation. Especially with Tencent joining RISC-V Foundation and becoming a senior member of Premier Members recently, the number of Chinese manufacturers has reached 14 among the 25 top-ranking Premier Members of RISC-V Foundation, including Alibaba Cloud, Andes, Beijing Open Source Chip Research Institute, Becoming Capital, Haihe Laboratory, Huawei, Imaging (which has been acquired by Chinese investors) ISCAS (Software Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences), RIOS Laboratory (affiliated to Tsinghua - Berkeley Shenzhen Research Institute), ZTE, Saifang Technology, Him Computing, Zhanrui, Tencent.

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It should be pointed out that as Premier Members, they can have seats on the board of directors and technical committees, which can directly affect the formulation of RISC-V standards and the direction of technical development. This time, Gao Jianlin, the head of Tencent Penglai Laboratory, will also represent Tencent to enter the RISC-V TSC Technical Steering Committee and actively participate in the development of RISC-V.

According to the information disclosed by Alibaba Pingtouge Semiconductor before, it is not only a member of the board of directors of RISC-V International Foundation, but also serves as the chairman and vice chairman of 11 technical organizations in the foundation, such as data center, storage management, Android, and security. Its importance and quantity are among the top in the world and the first in China.

With Tencent joining the RISC-V Foundation and becoming a member of Premier Members, the proportion of Chinese manufacturers among the 25 top-ranking Premier Members of RISC-V Foundation has reached 56%. In addition, among the strategic members of RISC-V Foundation, Chinese companies are also very many, such as Huami, Ruixinwei, Xinlai, Zhaoyi Innovation, Smart Core, Yunzhisheng, Zhongke Lanxun, Kampala, etc. (Samsung, NVIDIA and other large companies are also strategic members of RISC-V Foundation). It is no exaggeration to say that Chinese manufacturers dominate the future development direction of RISC-V. At the same time, China is also the most prosperous region and the largest market of RISC-V industry in the world.

Under the current demand for independent and controllable chip industry in China, the open source RISC-V architecture has become an important direction for Chinese chip manufacturers to strengthen the independent and controllable ability of chips and break the dependence on X86 architecture and Arm architecture.

Ni Guangnan, an academician of the CAE Member, said at the 2022 Yunqi Conference earlier that "the open source mode has moved from the software field to the hardware field. RISC-V has lowered the threshold for entering the chip industry and is also in line with the technology development trend of the future intelligent age of everything. China should strive to make RISC-V become the mainstream CPU architecture in the world in the new era of interconnection of everything, forming a pattern of x86, Arm and RISC-V."

Because RISC-V is a very young and future-oriented new architecture, its internal design is modular and scalable, which means that participants have a great deal of freedom in innovation. As long as the corresponding modules are added, they can expand to the mobile, desktop, data center market, and in many aspects such as AI, security, etc., it has more natural advantages than traditional architecture.

With the continuous evolution of RISC-V architecture and the participation of more and more chip manufacturers and upstream and downstream industry chain manufacturers, RISC-V is also accelerating its expansion to the mobile end, PC and server market after it has established itself in the Internet of Things market.

We can see that at the beginning of this year, Intel, the leader of the X86 market, also joined the RISC-V Foundation and became a member of Premier Members. Qualcomm, the most important partner of ARM in the mobile market, also joined the RISC-V camp very early and became a member of Premier Members. These all highlight the amazing charm of RISC-V.

According to Manju Varma, director of product management of Qualcomm, Qualcomm has applied RISC-V to the microcontroller of its Snapdragon 865 SoC in 2019, and has shipped 650 million RISC-V cores so far.

Arma stressed that the main advantage of RISC-V is that it receives functional contributions from various companies and organizations at all levels of the "value chain", from ISA and CPU, to system software, to operating system, and to end-user applications. Through RISC-V, we have the opportunity to define the chip design with "the best performance in the class, the best power efficiency and value-added functions". "These advantages also enable RISC-V, a general basic instruction set architecture, to extend from low-end microcontrollers to high-performance computing, and anything in between, which improves the efficiency of the entire industry.".

Previously, the most prominent label of RISC-V was low power consumption. In 2019, Pingtou Semiconductor took the lead in launching the black iron C910 with the highest main frequency of 2.5GHz, breaking the industry's performance imagination of RISC-V. At the end of November this year, Saifang Technology, a domestic RISC-V chip manufacturer, launched the world's first high-performance RISC-V chip for PC applications - Fang · Jinghong 8100. At the recent global RISC-V summit, the chip start-up Ventana Microsystems also released the world's first server-oriented CPU - Veyron V1. The efforts of these enterprises have demonstrated the possibility of RISC-V in the field of high-performance computing, and also provided a new way for the independent control of the domestic chip industry in the field of high-performance computing.

Although RISC-V still faces serious software ecological shortage in mobile devices, PCs, servers and other high-performance computing markets, domestic manufacturers are also actively solving this problem.

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For example, at the 2022 RISC-V China Summit in August this year, Pingtouge completed the adaptation of RISC-V to the cloud server-oriented Dragon lizard operating system, and ran large-scale desktop-level software such as FireFox browser and LibreOffice for the first time, as well as applications based on NodeJS and JAVA such as Hexo and Open Rocket, which greatly expanded the imagination of RISC-V. In September of this year, Pingtouge, Longsau Community, RISC-V International Foundation, and PLCT of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with Unitrust Software, successfully launched the deep operating system on Pingtouge RISC-V SoC prototype DragonVision 1520, smoothly running key large software such as desktop, office, audio and development, and pushed RISC-V to the desktop. When Deepin V23 is officially released, RISC-V will also exist as an officially supported architecture. On the mobile side, in October this year, the code patch collection of RISC-V porting Android contributed by Alibaba Pingtou was included in the system source code by the Android AOSP community, and became the first official patch of RISC-V compatible with Android in the world, which means that Google Android has opened the official native support for RISC-V architecture.

It is worth mentioning that in the context of Sino-US confrontation, in order to eliminate interference from the United States, the headquarters of RISC-V Foundation was also moved from the United States to Switzerland, a neutral country, at the end of 2019. This also dispelled the concerns of many domestic manufacturers about the possible "neck" problem of RISC-V.

However, with the outbreak of Russian-Uzbekistan conflict at the beginning of this year, both Europe and the United States have launched severe sanctions against Russia, and Switzerland has given up its neutrality for many years and participated in the sanctions against Russia. Although Switzerland soon withdrew its sanctions against Russia and renewed its neutrality, it also brought new doubts to the outside world. This also means that even if the headquarters of RISC-V Foundation is in Switzerland, it may still be used as a tool to sanction other countries in the event of a major power conflict. Will this have some adverse effects on the future development of RISC-V?

On this issue, Smart Core once interviewed the executives of a large domestic RISC-V chip factory. The other party said "This is really a new problem. I think both the RISC-V Foundation and those involved in RISC-V work hope that the development of RISC-V technology will not be affected by geographical disputes, which is also why the RISC-V Foundation moved to Switzerland from the United States. If Switzerland cannot maintain its neutral status, then from the overall perspective, I think the Foundation will definitely consider how to avoid this situation further."

As for the question of whether it is necessary to establish RISC-V branches in China, the executives of the large domestic RISC-V factory believe that RISC-V branches are already everywhere, many companies have their own branches, and China also has its own RISC-V alliance. The key is whether this branch really enjoys the value brought by RISC-V ecosystem and whether it can continue.The senior executive said, "I think we can establish such organizations or alliances of RISC-V technology in China, which is conducive to the growth of RISC-V ecosystem. But from the perspective of technology itself, everyone is a contributor and a beneficiary to the ecosystem, so it is naturally the best state for the world to form a synergy."

This article is selected from:芯智讯 2023-02-03