Recently, the Turing Award in 2022 was awarded to Robert Metcalfe, the father of Ethernet and the founder of 3Com. The Ethernet device and its protocol developed by him allow devices to connect to a local area network and share resources such as printers and files, greatly reducing network connection costs. In the view of Bao Yungang, Secretary General of the China Open Instruction Ecology (RISC-V) Alliance and Researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the biggest inspiration for Ethernet's success is to establish open standards. It provides a platform for further innovation, expands the market, and prospers the ecosystem. The open source culture behind it is actually an innovation in production methods. At the recently held Open Source Hardware and New Generation Industrial Revolution Forum, experts stated that open source, as an innovative collaborative model, not only has triggered changes in the software industry, but also in industries such as hardware, data, algorithms, and content in the future. The industrial chain, supply chain, and value chain will be reconstructed, and a new industrial revolution based on open source is coming. **The Enlightenment of Metcalfe's Law** Forty years ago, Robert Metcalfe, the winner of the New Jin Turing Award, proposed a law on the value of network scale: the value of a network is equal to the square of the number of nodes in the network, and the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. "Metcalfe's law" indicates that the more users of a network, the greater the value of the entire network. In other words, the returns brought by network scale often exceed expectations. To gain excess users, prices must be lowered, which is also the reason why many companies choose open source. For example, in 1981, IBM released all design documents, including source code and circuit diagrams, while also releasing personal computers. This greatly lowered the design threshold for personal computer software, which later benefited companies such as Dell, Lenovo, and Great Wall. Before the release of design documents, a personal computer was priced at about $9000. After the release, the price of the personal computer dropped all the way to $1500. It was the significant decrease in price that led to the prosperity of the personal computer market Tesla has also used the same business strategy. It attracts more large manufacturers to accelerate product research and development, expand production capacity, and further expand and strengthen in the overall progress of the industry by opening up patents. In August last year, the number of mobile IoT connections in China reached 1.698 billion, surpassing for the first time the 1.678 billion mobile phone users representing "person to person" connections. According to the Global Association for Mobile Communication Systems (GSMA), the number of global IoT terminal connections will reach 25 billion by 2025. According to the "Metcalfe" law, the large-scale network "expansion" will inevitably encourage enterprises to further reduce prices, and choosing open source design will become the trend. **Open standards change chip design** Have you ever thought about how smartphones and Bluetooth speakers are connected when they are manufactured by different companies? This is because Bluetooth is an open standard, which means its design specifications are public. Software and hardware based on open standards such as Ethernet, Wi Fi, and PDF have long been well-known. Nowadays, an open standard called RISC-V may change the way chips are designed. In January of this year, RISC-V was selected as one of the "Top 10 Global Breakthrough Technologies" by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review in 2023, which surprised Bao Yungang a bit. He originally expected major milestones in the RISC-V field to occur around 2025, but now it seems that the development of RISC-V is accelerating. RISC-V is an open-source chip instruction set developed by the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. Instruction set is a key technology used to communicate software and hardware. If software is considered a nut and hardware is considered a screw, the instruction set is the dimensional specification between the nut and the screw. The mainstream instruction sets in the current market include Intel's X86 and ARM's ARM. The former is good at handling big data, while the latter mainly handles fast data. Both support the mainstream chip architectures in the era of personal computers and mobile internet (mobile phones), respectively. In the era of the Internet of Things, when it is necessary to balance data transmission speed and volume, the competence of these two mainstream architectures is limited, and RISC-V shows strong advantages. It is reported that the average instruction count of RISC-V is only 1/10 of that of X86 and ARM, and its architecture can be freely changed to meet various performance requirements from smartwatches and smart cars to 5G base stations and servers. More importantly, RISC-V is not affiliated with any company, and any enterprise, team, or individual can use it for free to design chips. What changes will RISC-V bring to the chip industry ecosystem? Bao Yungang stated that in addition to significantly reducing the threshold and cost of chip design, it can also achieve the reuse of most functions, and users can customize their own value-added parts. **Seize the opportunity of the third chip wave** Currently, RISC-V chips are starting to appear in headphones, hard drives, and AI processors, with 10 billion cores sold. At the first Dark Iron RISC-V Ecological Conference held in Shanghai last month, David Patterson, the "father of RISC-V" and Turing Award winner, stated that in the field of the Internet of Things, it is expected that 28% of the market will be occupied by RISC-V by 2025; In the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, where RISC-V has the most opportunities to make progress, its compound growth rate will exceed 70%; It is expected that around 2027, 25 billion devices will be integrated into the RISC-V ecosystem.  We haven't fallen behind in this wave of open source chips, "said Bao Yungang. According to statistics, half of the 10 billion processors using RISC-V architecture worldwide in 2022 came from China, marking the initial formation of the RISC-V ecosystem in China. Ni Guangnan, an academician of the CAE Member, also pointed out that the emergence of RISC-V provides new opportunities for promoting the development of China's chip industry. From a global perspective, the RISC-V International Foundation is also constantly growing, with member growth rates exceeding 100% in the past few years, attracting over 3100 members from over 70 countries worldwide to join. From the proportion of strength in the foundation, China and the United States are in the first tier. Among the 24 senior members worldwide, 13 are from China, and 9 out of 22 council members are from China. In the past, there were two models for the development of processor chips in China, namely the high-speed rail model and the Beidou model. The former was introduced, digested, absorbed, and re innovated under the existing ecosystem, while the latter was completely self built technology system. With RISC-V, we can adopt the third model - the 5G model. Bao Yungang believes that domestic enterprises should accelerate their participation in the formulation of open standards and independently develop a number of key core technologies, Facing the international market, compatible with the international ecosystem, and seizing the opportunity of the third chip wave. Source of this article: 文汇报 , April 10, 2023, for academic sharing. Please indicate the source when reprinting. If there is infringement, please contact email: lvzhiqiang@perfxlab.com Delete or modify!