Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

At the 2022 RISC-V China Summit, Meng Jianyi, chairman of the RISC-V China Summit and vice president of Pingtou Semiconductor, reviewed to RISC-V the progress RISC-V has made in ecological construction in the past year.

The International Foundation has arranged more than 70 technical groups to customize technical standards; more than 160 processor cores are targeted at various fields, and the penetration of various industries is getting deeper and deeper; SPECint performance exceeds 10 points for the first time, making it into the ranks of high-performance computing; and there are more than 3100 members, an increase of 130% over 2021.

With the gradual improvement of RISC-V technology and ecology, RISC-V has made some landmark achievements in application in the past year.

The application scale of RISC-V processors in IoT is more than 10 billion, of which 50% are shipped by Chinese companies.

Pingtou released the first high-performance RISC-V chip platform, Wujian 600, which supports 4-core high-performance RISC-V processors with a maximum frequency of 2.5GHz. At the same time, it also launched the SoC prototype Shadow 1520. In the same period, Yuefang Technology and Saifang Technology also launched high-end application chips whose main frequency exceeds that of 1.5GHz, filling the gap in the high-performance field of RISC-V.

The industry is using actions to prove that high performance is no longer the taboo of RISC-V, and the development of high performance is the inevitable trend of RISC-V development. However, if you want to further compete with x86 and Arm in the high performance field, there are still two major problems waiting for RISC-V.

Processor performance needs to be enhanced, and software adaptation to improve the development of RISC-V with high performance will face challenges from processors and software. on the one hand, RISC-V processors need to make a breakthrough in performance while maintaining stability, on the other hand, there are some unsolved problems in basic software adaptation.

"only when the performance of the processor is improved can it be adapted to all kinds of software." "in addition, the stability of the processor is also very important, which is the basis of software migration in complex application scenarios," Meng said. "

In terms of software, Wu Yanjun, chief engineer of the Software Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said bluntly that although the Chinese Academy of Sciences software is located in the international upstream open source community, the domestic open source Euler community, and brother Pingtou have done a lot of RISC-V basic software adaptation work, but there are still many core basic software can not run smoothly on the RISC-V platform.

"there may be a lot of immature instruction set specifications here, because many basic packages used to run on X86 and Arm, and from the maintainer's and community's point of view, RISC-V has not been treated as Tire-1 or First-Class-Citizen. There are issues of concept, investment, and return on business interests." Wu Yanjun explained.

For this reason, the Software Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as an institution of the National Academy of Sciences, has been committed to transplanting the basic software that supports high-performance and leading the future ecological development to the RISC-V architecture, paving the way for commercial development, but still encountered some difficulties.

For example, after porting the basic software to the RISC-V verification platform, the debugging efficiency in the simulator environment is very low. "Pingtou released a high-performance RISC-V full-stack chip platform, which will provide a very good acceleration for the high-performance migration of basic software in the future." Wu Yanjun sighed.

In addition, the peripheral IP authorization problem that developers are concerned about is still difficult to break through in the short term, which is also a major obstacle to the development of high-performance RISC-V.

However, Wu Yanjun said that the RISC-V Foundation Board is trying to explore the path that open source software has taken. Open source software also encountered patent litigation in the early stage of development. at that time, in order to solve this problem, IBM, Intel, Linux Foundation and Free Software Foundation launched an organization called "Open Invention Network (OIN)" to set up a patent pool. All organizations that join the OIN organization need to sign a corresponding agreement to give up their claims to the relevant patents and jointly resist external patent lawsuits.

"if RISC-V can form such a model in the future, the obstacles to the patent of peripheral IP may be cleared one by one. But after all, the basic software and semiconductor industries are different. The semiconductor industry has a longer history of patent layout and profit, and there will be more obstacles and barriers, which may be much more difficult than software." Wu Yanjun said to Leifeng net (official account: Leifeng net).

Meng Jianyi also said that when developing Wujian 600, Pingtou will choose domestic IP according to actual needs to jointly promote the ecological construction of RISC-V.

Higher-performance RISC-V hardware can support more software adaptation, and more software adaptation can make RISC-V develop to a higher performance field.

High-performance RISC-V "breeds" multi-core heterogeneity. Nowadays, most application scenarios need parallel computing, so whether in x86 or Arm world, core is used to improve performance. Some AI applications even have thousands of processor cores. Pingtou Wujian 600 supports 4 RISC-V processor cores. will RISC-V also improve processor performance by stacking cores?

"Multi-core architecture has some advantages, but it cannot be generalized. In some scenarios and applications, higher-performance single-core processors are also needed." Meng Jianyi said.

Wu Yanjun agrees with this view and says that with RISC-V, there are more heterogeneous options at the core level.

When we talked about heterogeneous multi-core computing before, we actually had to rely on the specifications of processor vendors or instruction set vendors, such as the large core and small core of ARM, some extended instruction sets of X86, and so on. If the RISC-V ecology reaches a certain extent, our description of a computing platform may no longer be as general as how many cores, how many hertz, how much TOPS, how much power consumption. It is possible to say how many cores of the same type and what customization capabilities each core has. These different types of cores are integrated into one platform and encapsulated in a single machine with a variety of processing capabilities to meet the needs of different scenarios. " Wu Yanjun said.

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