Last December, Tencent announced that it would join RISC-V International Foundation, an open source instruction set standard. After Alibaba, Huawei, Unisplendor, ZTE, Chinese Academy of Sciences and other enterprises and institutions, RISC-V camp once again ushered in new Chinese members.
In the past January, Lars Bergstrom, Google's Android Engineering Director, also said at the RISC-V Summit that he hoped that RISC-V would become the first-level platform of Android, which was the same as the meaning of ARM to Android. Google's support is also an important milestone for the RSIC-V camp.
It seems that RISC-V is now highly expected. Fortunately, China's industry has achieved preliminary development.
**01 China's RISC-V industry is beginning to take advantage**
According to the data of RISC-V International Foundation, 13 of the 25 top members of RISC-V, including Tencent, are from China. China also has a leading position in the shipment volume of RISC-V. By July 2022, the shipment of RISC-V architecture chips has exceeded 10 billion. The Dark Iron series developed by Alibaba Pingtouge has been widely recognized in the Internet of Things chip market, with a shipment of more than 3 billion. The shipment of RISC-V chips in China's chip industry has reached 5 billion, accounting for half of the 10 billion.
The processor chip is the weakness of China's semiconductor industry and the "bottleneck" problem faced by China's semiconductor industry. RISC-V benefits from its advantages of instruction simplification, modularization, scalability and open source, and has brought many benefits to China's processor industry.
**02 RISC-V is an opportunity for Chinese processors**
In 2018, the United States Department of Commerce banned the sale of parts and commodities to ZTE, resulting in a shortage of chips in the latter; In 2019, after the United States imposed chip sanctions on Huawei, the fluctuations in the chip supply chain intensified... On the basis of many unstable factors, the open instruction set standard RISC-V has become an important choice for countries seeking independence and control.
Through RISC-V structure, we can get rid of foreign monopoly. X86 and ARM, as the two major architectures of processor chips, have accumulated a thick patent wall after decades of development. It is difficult for new companies to avoid massive patent blocking when designing X86 chips. But RISC-V is new and open source. On the one hand, there is no need to worry that ISA is in the hands of one company so that it can regain its advantages over other companies by updating the version of ISA at any time; On the other hand, China's starting time on RISC-V is almost the same as that of foreign countries, so it has enough time to accumulate its own patent pool and launch domestic private IP and chips, which hopefully can help Chinese manufacturers quickly design customized processor cores containing independent intellectual property rights.
RISC-V can promote the innovation and differentiation of Chinese processors. China's semiconductor industry lacks core processor instruction set. Although the processor IP core provided by ARM can meet the general application requirements, its technology and business model make the customization based on ARM IP very difficult. It neither meets the trend of heterogeneous computing customization, nor can it bring great help to China's self-developed customized processors. RISC-V's modular and scalable advantages can greatly make up for this shortcoming.
**03 Achievements of China RISC-V**
At present, Chinese chip manufacturers have completely developed various chips based on RISC-V architecture, including AlOT for low power consumption, high-performance computing, AI, server, CPU, etc.
For example, Alibaba's RISC-V chips have formed three series of C, E and R, which can be used in fields such as AI, high-performance computing, and low-power applications, such as Tuoying 1520 chip and black iron C908; In terms of ecology, Alibaba's RISC-V chip has been deeply compatible with the international mainstream and domestic operating systems such as RTOS, Yocto Linux, Android, Dragon monitor, and can be used for mobile phones, computers, servers, etc.
The Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences took the lead in launching the "Xiangshan" high-performance open-source RISC-V processor project in 2019. In June 2020, the first version of the Xiangshan processor Yanqi Lake architecture was officially released; The second version of the South Lake architecture was released in March 2022, and is planned to be released in the first quarter of 2023; At present, the third version of Kunming Lake architecture is also in progress.
However, the long march of RISC-V in China has just begun. The open source RISC-V architecture is becoming a new direction for many large enterprises.
**04 More European and American enterprises turn to RISC-V**
At present, Qualcomm, Google, Intel and other American companies are senior members of the RISC-V Foundation. Apple, AMD and other large companies are making some moves in the RISC-V field. Europe has also begun its layout.
**Intel's PlanB** Intel, as the leader of X86, has also taken frequent actions in the RISC-V field. First, it participated in the C-round financing of SiFive, and personally cooperated with SiFive to develop the RISC-V architecture chip, and then joined the RISC-V International Foundation, and launched a $1 billion fund to establish the OEM innovation production system. In the middle of last year, Intel and Barcelona Supercomputing Center jointly invested 400 million euros to build RISC-V processor laboratory. Many people speculate that Intel may want to use RISC-V as a PlanB to create new products and enhance the innovation of its own products.
**Apple and AMD have entered the market** In 2021 and 2022, Apple and AMD announced the recruitment of RISC-V high-performance programmers and architects of embedded RISC-V CPUs. Among them, Apple's RISC-V recruitment requirements describe that RISC-V is used to support necessary calculations in machine learning, visual algorithms, signal and video processing, and Apple's RISC-V will probably be used in smart wearable devices such as watches in the future. AMD is also looking for experts with high performance GPU experience, and requires relevant experience in RISC-V RV64 CPU, CPU out-of-order execution, speculative execution and branch predictor. Industry insiders speculate that AMD may also be developing a new microcontroller.
**Qualcomm: vigorously embrace RISC-V** At the Global RISC-V Summit last week, Manju Varma, director of product management of Qualcomm, revealed that Qualcomm had applied RISC-V to the microcontroller in its Snapdragon 865 SoC in 2019, and has shipped 650 million RISC-V cores so far. Originally, Qualcomm was a strong supporter of ARM architecture and has always used ARM architecture. With the outbreak of patent war between Qualcomm and ARM, Qualcomm seems to be accelerating its layout in RISC-V field.
Europe also wants to reduce its dependence on X86 and ARM. The European Union recently announced that it would invest 270 million euros to fund a high-performance computer project based on RISC-V software and hardware. In addition, Google, which just announced its support for RISC-V, is enough to prove that RISC-V has great development value.
**05 How should China develop RISC-V in the future?**
RISC-V is good at two aspects, one is the Internet of Things market with high fragmentation, low cost, low power consumption and differentiation requirements, and the other is the AI field with high demand for heterogeneous computing. China also happens to have the largest market in these two fields. However, in the future development, China still needs to focus on it.
**Software and hardware co-development** RISC-V will move towards open application scenarios, and establishing a mature software ecosystem will be the biggest challenge for RISC-V to implement in open application scenarios. However, RISC-V software ecosystem is immature, poor compatibility, and difficult to develop. At present, most of the chips in mass production are used in relatively closed application scenarios. The software requirements are relatively simple and fixed. The chip manufacturer can achieve 70% of the software. In the open application scenario, the software demand will increase exponentially, such as the transplantation of various operating systems, the optimization of middleware and library functions, and the adaptation of various development frameworks. Each technology point is a huge project, which must be fully invested in cooperation with chip manufacturers, third-party software companies, and the open source community.
**Find a clear market entry point** To achieve reliable and high-quality commercial solutions, RISC-V needs to continuously improve the standards and specifications of RISC-V instruction set on the one hand, and on the other hand, it needs to find clear application scenarios to generate opportunities for technical iteration. In the field of computer processors and mobile phone processors, the X86/ARM ecosystem is quite mature. RISC-V wants to compete for market share from it, which is tantamount to "grabbing food from a tiger". In the fields of the Internet of Things, security chips, smart wear and other fields, the cornerstone of the ARM market is not solid, and RISC-V may have more opportunities.
**Development towards high performance** The main application directions of RISC-V processors currently under research are ultra-high performance computing and vector computing. After several years of development, RISC-V has been relatively mature in the low-end application field, but there is still a gap between RISC-V and other architecture processors (mainly ARM) in the field of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence applications. Because RISC-V instruction set is too simple and fragmented, most of its application scenarios are embedded. In terms of high-performance processors, RISC-V chip products occupy the majority with 32 bits. From the perspective of reality, RISC-V will continue to evolve towards high performance, while high-end "momentum" still needs a long time of tempering.
**Support from production, teaching and research** RISC-V has provided China with a breakthrough in the core technology of processors. It should promote the development of RISC-V from the perspective of funds, policies, scientific research, teaching and other aspects. Increase support for educational and scientific research institutions, support university education and research based on RISC-V, including the development of software, hardware and applications, continue to provide fresh blood for industrial development, carry out extensive ecological layout, and promote the adaptation of software in RISC-V, including RISC-V basic software, operating system, middleware and application software.
RISC-V is widely welcomed in China because of its open source characteristics. Almost at the same time, a large number of Chinese chip companies increased their investment in RISC-V. However, the development status of RISC-V is that there are many people who are optimistic about this technology, but there are few people who really do it, and more support is needed for this industry.
**06 Conclusion**
With the emergence of stable hardware, the full stack of RISC-V architecture software and hardware has become an inevitable trend. From IP to SoC, to development board, SOM, operating system and application software will be comprehensively optimized. RISC-V architecture will move towards broader ecological cooperation, more new models will be available in business, software will continue to be enriched, and applications will continue to be diversified.
As the best place for the landing and development of RISC-V, China has sufficient application scenarios to give full play to the diversity of RISC-V. At the same time, the Chinese industry is also forming a broad RISC-V ecosystem covering chip design, design tools, basic software, chip applications and talent training. However, this is only the beginning. RISC-V has a long way to go in the future and needs to make more efforts.
Source of this article: 半导体产业纵横 2023-02-13 For academic sharing only, please indicate the source for reprinting. In case of infringement, please contact email:lvzhiqiang@perfxlab.com Delete or modify!