The Rise Of Risc-V Chip Architecture Is Still In Its Infancy

Recently, the battle and acquisition of arm continue to cause heated discussion in the industry, and the chip design enterprises enter the public view again. At the same time, arm is facing the challenge of risc-v architecture.

In other words, risc-v, a new force, is rising rapidly in the high barrier industries of chip design and chip architecture. Especially in recent years, facing the trend of heterogeneous computing, some industry experts predict that x86, arm and risc-v will have a chance to win the third place in the future.

The chip architecture here is the instruction set architecture, and the set of instructions recognized by the processor is called instruction set architecture. Generally speaking, the instruction set is like a whole set of language system. The CPU can read and run the program and hardware according to the requirements. And this set of efficient language specifications, need to be developed when designing CPU.

Up to now, CPU mainly has two instruction sets: complex instruction set (CISC) architecture x86, and reduced instruction set (RISC) architecture camp includes arm, MIPs and risc-v. Risc-v is the fifth generation instruction set architecture based on the principle of "reduced instruction set", and it is open-source to the outside world. Due to the attributes of open-source, neutral and concise, and not affected by the U.S. policy, risc-v is regarded as an opportunity to overtake on the curve by many countries.

Wang Wei, vice president of core technology, told the 21st century economic report that Professor David Patterson's goal is to make risc-v into Linux in the hardware industry. "Now people are more and more accepted, but it is a process of gradual development of risc-v. This year, the voice of public opinion is very lively, and it is also related to geopolitics. However, in terms of the development process of technology itself, it still needs time to accumulate. "

New force

At that time, Intel insisted on the development of complex instruction set, won the victory, and is still strong now. However, we have to face the reality that the reduced instruction set has won the mobile terminal market. More than 90% of the mobile processors use arm architecture, and the risc-v is a rising star in the field of Internet of things.

According to the public data, the essence of the reduced instruction set proposed by Professor David Patterson of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979 is to advocate that hardware should focus on accelerating common program instructions. The advantages of the reduced instruction set are simple architecture design and low power consumption area. It is very suitable for mobile phones and board computers, but it has been unable to compete with X86 or arm.

Until 2010, a research team at the University of California, Berkeley, wanted to select an instruction set for a new project. They found that the x86 architecture was very closed, while the arm instruction set license fee was very expensive. So they turned to risc-iv, improved it with Professor Patterson, and launched risc-v, which was completely open-source.

Yao Jiayang, a consulting analyst with trendforce group, told 21st century economic news: "risc-v's advantage lies in the open source mode in the development of instruction set. Under the condition that the basic instruction set of risc-v remains unchanged, anyone (or manufacturer) can further construct an instruction set that meets the needs of the market on the basic instruction set. Because of the open source relationship, the communities can communicate with each other and make more contributions to the risc-v community, thus contributing to the rapid development of technology. "

The Research Report of Southwest Securities pointed out that although risc-v and arm belong to the reduced instruction set architecture, because risc-v is only launched in recent years, it does not bear the historical burden of backward compatibility, and its architecture is short and concise. Compared with X86 and arm, risc-v specification document only has 145 pages, and "privilege architecture document" is only 91 pages.

In addition, the neutral nature of risc-v has gained more supporters. In 2015, risc-v foundation was established. At present, the foundation members include more than 300 global enterprises such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Samsung and Google, Alibaba, Huawei and huami. This year, the US based risc-v foundation officially moved to Switzerland because of concerns about potential trade restrictions. "The establishment of risc-v foundation makes it not subject to any one or two companies. It is a relatively neutral platform, including foundation members and physical location, in a relatively neutral environment," Wang said

Early ecological stage

Therefore, many enterprises at home and abroad have invested in risc-v ecology.

In China, Alibaba's Zhongtian micro has launched ck902, a third-generation instruction system architecture processor, which supports risc-v. pingtouge has launched xuantie 910, a risc-v processor with 16 cores, which uses 12 nanometer technology. Huami Technology launched the risc-v chip research and development plan in 2017, and released Huangshan No.1 wearable processor based on risc-v open source instruction set in 2018; RISC core technology Co., Ltd Pygmy is a risc-v multi-core heterogeneous AI SOC for aiot, which can be applied in intelligent voice, intelligent toys, robots, industrial vision, wearable and other application scenarios.

At the end of this year, when we need to speed up the operation of CPU chip, we can speed up the operation of CPU. The difference between this and the external ASIC chip lies in its programmability. As a command of CPU, it can be directly passed through the compiler without knowing the hardware structure. Of course, there will be an optimal solution in a specific scenario combined with a specific algorithm. Our products are terminal oriented and edge oriented. "

However, risc-v is still in the early stage of development, and the commercialization of this new force is still in the exploratory stage. In Wang Wei's view, "the main challenge is that the CPU field does not rely on its own efforts, but also needs more cooperation from the ecological environment, including compilers and tool chains. More partners are needed to participate in the ecological construction. The early generation and development of risc-v are all abroad, and the development rhythm is at a pace International cooperation is very important. As a new instruction set, risc-v is now in its early stage, and its ecological environment is not complete enough. In the early stage of development, it is mainly the maturity and richness of some software ecological environment, which needs a certain period of time to develop. However, in specific edge application fields, the degree of dependence on this is not so high, and the development will be better. "

Southwest Securities report pointed out that in the history of semiconductors, x86 and arm as the mainstream architecture have always occupied a large market. With the advent of the Internet of things era, risc-v, as an emerging architecture, may gain absolute advantages in the future IOT field with its simplified size. Other application scenarios include mobile phones, servers, storage and other markets.

Yao Jiayang analyzed to the reporter: "the most important key to the development of commercialization is whether the terminal application is willing to use the mainstream products of risc-v architecture, such as smart meters, smart wear or intelligent motor control. Broadly speaking, these products can be classified in the field of Internet (IOT). Due to the extremely diverse application scope and relatively high customization demand in this field, risc-v is actually a stage where risc-v can play its characteristics.

On the other hand, for example, EDA and wafer manufacturers have deep cooperation with arm camp. If we can get the cooperation between EDA and wafer manufacturers, we can make breakthrough progress in the 28 and 22nm process to achieve efficiency and cost advantages, which will have an opportunity to win the favor of some chip and OEM manufacturers