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

Core hint:

1. The reason why the domestic chip industry places high hopes on the RISC-V architecture is largely due to the choking incident of the United States on Huawei, which makes us realize that the chip must be developed independently and get rid of the dependence on foreign technology. The open source feature of RISC-V is regarded by the industry as a technological direction that can bypass the western monopoly.

two。 Meng Jianyi, vice president of Pingtou Brother, told Phoenix New Media Technology that with the advent of the AIoT era, there has been a customized demand for chips, which is more easily met by low-power, customizable RISC-V processors. (RISC-V processors) have made remarkable progress and have great potential for development.

3.RISC-V brings hope for the domestic breakthrough of chip monopoly, but it can not be blindly optimistic, it also has many risks and technical challenges. Semiconductor expert Zhang Guobin pointed out that the open source of RISC-V is free, which is not completely free in the industry, and the risk cost of developing chips based on RISC-V open source architecture can not be ignored. In addition, many interfaces are not compatible with RISC-V, and the ecosystem is not perfect.

"China Core should take the third way." In his speech at the 2022 RISC-V China Summit on August 24, Academician Ni Guangnan said: at present, the mainstream CPU market is still monopolized by X86 and ARM architecture, but the emerging open source instruction set RISC-V will provide new opportunities for the development of China's chip industry. If we seize the opportunity, it is possible to take the initiative in the core technology of CPU.

RISC-V, which was born in 2010, is an open source architecture based on the principle of reduced instruction set (RISC). It is the largest CPU architecture besides ARM and x86 architecture, and it is also one of the main architectures of domestic self-developed chips.

At a time when geopolitics affect the global economy, the importance of chip autonomy is self-evident. This month, US President Joe Biden formally signed the Chip and Science Act 2022 undefined, which clearly stipulates that companies receiving US subsidies are not allowed to engage in any major transactions with China or other countries that worry the United States for 10 years, and the market's attention to RISC-V has increased again.

Picture | Ni Guangnan, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering

The speech of Academician Ni Guangnan not only strengthened the confidence of independent research and development in the chip industry, but also triggered a certain discussion.

Why can RISC-V architecture compete with ARM / X86? What is the current situation of China's RISC-V industry? Will it be the key technology direction of Chinese chip independence? With these questions, Phoenix New Media Technology interviewed Meng Jianyi, vice president of Pingtou, and Zhang Guobin, founder of Electronic Innovation Network and semiconductor expert.

Why can RISC-V compete with ARM / X86? In the current chip market, there are four mainstream instruction sets: X86, MIPS, ARM and RISC-V, which are often referred to as chip architecture. Instruction set / architecture is a series of specification languages stored in the processor (chip) to guide it to run calculations, including a variety of complex algorithms.

Simply put, whether the instruction set / architecture is advanced or not is directly related to the performance of CPU.

RISC-V, which Academician Ni Guangnan likes, is an open source architecture based on the principle of reduced instruction set (RISC). Different from the private instruction set architecture of foreign commercial companies such as x86 and ARM, the biggest feature of RISC-V is "open standardization", that is, anyone is allowed to design and manufacture chips free of royalties.

This means that any company can use RISC-V without having to worry about the risk of being cut off. Therefore, it was once regarded as the hope of realizing chip autonomy in our country.

RISC-V has the characteristics of simple architecture and modelable design. For example, the RISC-V basic instruction set RV32I has only 47 instructions, while the x86 instruction set has more than 1400, and the ARM instruction set has increased to 1200. At the same time, X86 and ARM will be added two per month, but RISC-V will not be added, which can reduce the chip area and energy consumption of the processor.

Because the RV32I instruction set is fixed, compiler writers and language programmers have stable goals and can organize different parts together through modular design. In other words, RISC-V does not have the compatibility baggage of the X86 / ARM instruction set and can better meet the needs of subdivided scenarios.

The characteristics of RISC-V make it rise rapidly around the world and become the focus of innovation in emerging applications such as semiconductors and the Internet of things. In recent years, RISC-V is more active in industrial control and vehicle networking applications, especially in the end-side RISC-V architecture IP covers security chips, AIoT and other application scenarios, which used to be the dominant areas of Arm.

Meng Jianyi, vice president of Pingtou, told Phoenix New Media Technology that with the advent of the AIoT era, more and more intelligent devices have emerged, giving rise to a customized demand for chips, which is more easily met by low-power, customizable RISC-V processors, so it has made remarkable progress and has great potential for development.

At the industry level, the RISC-V Foundation has attracted a large number of manufacturers, including Invida, Google, Xisu, Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei Hayes, etc., with more than 3100 members. At present, there are 10 billion RISC-V cores on the market, and the data set by RISC-V in only 12 years exceeds that of AER. In 2021, there are more than 160 processor cores for various fields, infiltrating into various industries.

Is RISC-V the key solution for China's chip self-research? A large part of the reason why the domestic chip industry places high hopes on RISC-V is the choking incident of Huawei in the United States, which makes us realize that chips must be developed independently and get rid of dependence on foreign technology. The open source feature of RISC-V is regarded by the industry as a technological direction that can bypass the western monopoly.

In 2018, the US Department of Commerce banned ZTE from selling parts and goods, resulting in a shortage of chips. After the United States imposed chip sanctions on Huawei in 2019, domestic chip companies worried about the risks of cooperation with ARM and joined the RISC-V camp one after another.

At the same time, domestic government policies, industrial research and other aspects work together to accelerate the development of RISC-V architecture. In 2018, the Shanghai government issued a policy to support software and integrated circuits, which explicitly mentioned "supporting the development and industrialization of 32-bit and above processor chips based on RISC-V instruction set architecture".

In the same year, Ni Guangnan United Nations industry established the China RISC-V Industry Alliance. Subsequently, under the leadership of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the China Open Directive Ecology (RISC-V) Alliance was established. The original intention of the establishment of the two alliances is to promote the improvement of RISC-V ecology in China.

At present, more than 80 per cent of the highest-ranking members of the RISC-V board are Chinese companies, and more than 70 per cent of the main members of RISC-V are from China, including Alibaba, Huawei, SMIC, Ziguang Zhanrui, Jingchen shares, core shares and so on. As of this year, the application scale of RISC-V processors in IoT has exceeded 10 billion, with Chinese companies accounting for 50 per cent of shipments.

Chinese enterprises are contributing more and more to the technology and application of RISC-V. On August 24, Ali Pingtou released the first high-performance RISC-V chip design platform, Wujian 600, bringing RISC-V from 1GHz frequency performance to the level of 2GHz commercial performance; at the end of last year, Huawei's official website announced a new HD TV chip Hi373V110, with CPU; built in Heidi's self-developed RISC-V architecture. In addition, ZTE and Xinyuan shares are also accelerating their own research on products based on RISC-V architecture.

Many experts believe that RISC-V architecture is a rare opportunity for Chinese enterprises, because RISC-V started late, the gap at home and abroad is not as large as the traditional X86 architecture, there is a certain space to catch up.

Semiconductor expert Zhang Guobin revealed that although the ARM / X86 architecture is still the mainstream of the CPU market, RISC-V has become a key project for many car companies and technology companies in order to seize the Internet of things, AR intelligence and other markets ahead of time.

RISC-V ecology is not mature enough and has patent risk although RISC-V brings hope for the domestic breakthrough of chip monopoly, but it can not be blindly optimistic, it also has many risks and technical challenges.

Semiconductor expert Zhang Guobin told us that there is a consensus in the industry that RISC-V is an open source instruction set, but it is not completely free. For example, some companies design a commercial CPU based on the RISC-V instruction set, and then sell or license the CPU. In this sense, it is open source, not free.

At the same time, the risk cost of developing chips based on RISC-V architecture can not be ignored. RISC-V is open source available, which also means that there is no "after-sales" service, and problems with this architecture may require you to explore your own solutions. In the highly professional field of chip design, it may take more cost and time to deal with the problem.

RISC-V is currently in the stage of development, and many interfaces are not compatible with RISC-V, which also hinders its development. Meng Jianyi points out that ARM has built a more complete software and hardware ecosystem and formed a reliable business cycle, and RISC-V still has a long way to go to reach the maturity of ARM.

Zhang Guobin said that it took ARM more than a decade to establish a mature ecology in China. RISC-V starting point is relatively high, domestic response companies, the time may be shortened, at least three to five years. "Market penetration is not so fast, there are not many chips really mass-produced based on RISC-V, and there are no general-purpose chips."

In addition, compared with X86 and ARM,RISC-V, the development in the field of high-performance computing is still insufficient.

Torbj ö rn Granlund, a developer of the GMP library, has pointed out that the RISC-V instruction set is so simple and fragmented that most of its application scenarios are embedded. In terms of high-performance processors, RISC-V chip products are mostly 32-bit. From a realistic point of view, RISC-V will continue to evolve to high performance, and high-end "momentum" will also take a long time to temper.

Meng Jianyi said that the mass production of high-performance RISC-V chips requires advanced technology and tests the ability of the entire chip design, especially in the balance between performance and power consumption, which requires a lot of research and development efforts.

Finally, the rise of RISC-V also requires the outbreak of new industries.

In the field of computer processors and mobile phone processors, the ecology of X86 / ARM is already quite mature. If RISC-V wants to compete for market share, it is tantamount to "grabbing food with a tiger's mouth". In the Internet of things, security chips, smart wear and other areas, the cornerstone of the Arm market is not stable, there are more opportunities for RISC-V.

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