Maybe you really "misunderstood" RISC-V!

In recent years, RISC-V has become very popular. With its open source, minimalist, modular and extensible features, it has quickly attracted the attention and participation of a large number of companies. In less than half a year since the establishment of the China RISC-V Industry Alliance, more than 100 companies, universities or institutions have joined it. Its popularity can be imagined.

On March 19, 2019, the "2019 RISC-V CON" Shanghai Station hosted by Andes Technology was successfully held at Purple Mountain Hotel. Xinshiye also interviewed Andes Technology General Manager Lin Zhiming and Andes Technology Chief Technology Officer Su Hongmeng on the spot, and gave a comprehensive interpretation of the current hot topics of RISC-V!

Andes Technology General Manager Lin Zhiming (right) and Andes Technology Chief Technology Officer Su Hongmeng (left)

"Although RISC-V is very popular now, many people still don't know much about it. Maybe they just heard about it from people around them." Regarding the current situation of RISC-V, Su Hongmeng said: " RISC-V is still in the market promotion stage , and the information conveyed may be inaccurate, so some people still have some misunderstandings about RISC-V."

As for RISC-V, it is only an open source instruction set. The most important link in chip design and manufacturing still requires the participation and improvement of the ecological chain, and there are still certain requirements for corporate design capabilities . It does not mean that as long as there is RISC-V, anyone can make chips.

In this regard, Lin Zhiming believes: "From another perspective, although RISC-V has certain requirements for design capabilities, its ecosystem is open source, and companies can obtain IP licenses at a relatively low cost, greatly reducing the cost of chip design and development. This is one of the important reasons why RISC-V has attracted so much attention."

In order to better serve the development of the RISC-V ecosystem, as a professional processor IP company, Andes Technology has also upgraded AndeStar and launched the new generation AndeStar™ V5 processor architecture , which supports 64-bit processors and RISC-V instruction set architecture. Through advantages in compilers, tool chains, digital signal processing (DSP), security, etc., it promotes RISC-V architecture into mainstream SOC applications.

" For the RISC-V ecosystem, if we want it to develop healthily, we cannot just share without contributing ." Regarding the subsequent development, Su Hongmeng said: " With more than 10 years of evolution and accumulation, the global cumulative shipments of chips using the Andes Technology architecture have exceeded 3.5 billion, and are widely used in voice recognition, WIFI, Bluetooth, touch screen controllers, MCU, SSD controllers, storage devices, communications and other fields. Our design concept is very close to RISC-V, and the user transition cost is very low. At this stage, we also hope to vigorously promote and lead the development of the RISC-V ecosystem with our own actions. The company's subsequent products will all adopt the RISC-V architecture. "

It is understood that the RISC-V Foundation was established in 2015. In just five years, it has attracted more than 200 world-leading technology companies such as IBM, NXP, Western Digital, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Google, and Huawei to join the RISC-V camp. Among them, Western Digital has also promised to convert its core processors, which use more than 1 billion units per year, to the RISC-V architecture.

In China, the "Huangshan No. 1" wearable artificial intelligence chip using the RISC-V architecture has also been successfully taped out and will be officially applied to Huami's smart devices in 2019. Does this mean that RISC-V chips will soon be available on a large scale?

对此，林志明认为：“ 我司客户RISC-V芯片年出貨量如果与前一代V3芯片一样以同样进度达到10亿颗的出货级别，至少还需要5-6年，但在RISC-V 全球风潮下，乐观地看有机会在3-4年达成年出货量20亿颗 。一方面，这与芯片开发周期相关，一款芯片从定义、设计、流片、验证及量产，往往需要几年时间。另一方面，虽然很多企业都在用RISC-V，但是每家的进度和应用领域并不同。目前来看，积极乐观者颇多，例如西部数据就是有大规模使用计划的典范。”

It can be seen from this that although many companies are doing it, it will take some time for RISC-V chips to truly increase in volume and form a complete ecosystem.

In response to this problem, the China Open Instruction Ecosystem (RISC-V) Alliance has also proposed a three-step plan for 2030. The first step is to open source SoC, and provide the community with high-quality RISC-V open source cores and open source SoC designs that have been verified by tape-out in 3-5 years. The second step is to build an open source SoC with an open source tool chain, and gradually build a set of open source SoC chip design processes based on an open source EDA tool chain, open source IP, and open source process library in 5-7 years. The third step is to use the open source tool chain to automatically build open source hardware, and use 10-15 years to develop smarter and more automated open source tools to provide design verification efficiency.

This will form an open source chip ecosystem and lower the threshold for chip development.

As for RISC-V, it was born to break the monopoly of X86 and ARM.

Regarding this topic, Dr. Fang Zhixi, Chairman of the RISC-V Foundation China Advisory Committee, said: " Currently, 99% of cloud servers use the X86 architecture, and 99% of end-side servers use the RISC architecture, of which ARM architecture accounts for 75%. The long-term monopoly of X86 and ARM architectures has made it difficult for chip design to have revolutionary innovations, and it is increasingly difficult to reduce power consumption and increase computing speed. The industry needs new changes, and RISC-V has emerged as a result."

In this regard, Lin Zhiming believes: " Although RISC-V has broken the monopoly of X86 and ARM architecture, it is almost impossible to replace X86 in personal computers and ARM architecture in mobile phones or tablets as central processors . It has formed a complete ecosystem. If a customer wants to make a central processor for a personal computer, mobile phone or tablet, I still recommend him to use X86 and ARM architecture instead of RISC-V."

"I think RISC-V's greater advantages and opportunities lie in peripheral and embedded fields, especially in new application areas such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, 5G, and autonomous driving ." Regarding the future development of RISC-V, Lin Zhiming further added: "Different architectures will also develop simultaneously, but the proportion of RISC-V in subsequent new products will gradually increase."

It can be seen that in the field of central computing, X86 and ARM architectures are difficult to be shaken, and peripheral computing and embedded areas are the "main battlefield" of RISC-V architecture!

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