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100 billion chips will be an important witness to the vitality of RISC-V.
"
Author | Bao Yonggang
Editor | Wang Chuan
The future sometimes moves faster than people imagine.
As Liu Cixin wrote in "The Three-Body Problem", humans are a race subject to a "technological explosion."
The wheel of time is constantly reshaping people's understanding of technology. Even those who ignite a spark can hardly imagine the wildfire that will spread across the prairie in the future.
Mowgli and Eckert, who invented the world's first general-purpose computer in 1946, never expected that the computing power that once required a 170-square-kilometer, 30-ton behemoth could now be easily obtained through cloud computing. .
John McCarthy, who proposed the concept of artificial intelligence in 1961, could not imagine the scene where AI assistants are now active at people's fingertips.
Martin Cooper, who invented the mobile phone in the 1990s, never imagined that the mobile communication tool he developed would one day almost evolve into an "external organ" for human beings, infiltrating into every aspect of life.
Behind all these unexpected events, there is one reasonable reason: the evolution of the underlying processor.
At the end of the 20th century, Arm CPU did not have a smooth entry into the PC market, but after turning to the mobile CPU market and changing its business model, it finally saw the light and achieved the prosperity of mobile Internet.
At the beginning of the 21st century, x86 CPU, which was popular in the PC processor market, unexpectedly entered the server market with its cost-effective advantage and promoted the development of cloud computing.
In 2010, the emerging instruction set RISC-V was born at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2014, the first group of people in China who came into contact with RISC-V were attracted by the open source nature of RISC-V, but no one knew how RISC-V would develop in the future.
When Ali Pingtouge's team came into contact with RISC-V in 2014, they were also skeptical about the prospects of commercializing this emerging instruction set. Brother Pingtou, who recognized the open source concept, later verified the technical capabilities of RISC-V and then proved the high performance of RISC-V.
In the golden autumn of 2022, Brother Pingtou rushed into the blue ocean of RISC-V high-energy-efficiency CPU with Xuantie C908, and went to explore the edge AI market.
This is a crucial battle for Pingtou Ge and will also be an important milestone on the road ahead for RISC-V.
The "surprises" that RISC-V will bring to the technology industry are hidden in the development of RISC-V in recent years.
High energy efficiency blue ocean,
RISC-V comes up with two major killer features
In 2014, RISC-V was only active in the circles of a few technology enthusiasts. "
In 2014, we were a little unsure about whether to fully invest in RISC-V.
" Meng Jianyi, vice president of Pingtou Ge, said, "We were mainly worried about whether the instruction set capabilities from academia were sufficient, and we were not clear about the advantages of its functions. where."
This is actually the concern of most people who are on the sidelines about RISC-V. However, under the appeal of the open source concept, further research in the academic community, and the joint efforts of technical geeks, RISC-V was introduced to China in 2016 and began to attract attention.
In 2018, Pingtou Ge, who had been exposed to RISC-V for a long time, also took the lead in developing the first RISC-V CPU——
Xuantie E902 is a low-performance CPU with low power consumption. This is actually a product of Pingtou Ge to test RISC-V. After verifying the low power consumption of RISC-V, Pingtou Ge launched Xuantie C910 with a main frequency of up to 2.5GHz a year later, and the ability to use RISC-V to make high-performance products has also been verified.
After having enough confidence in RISC-V, Pingtou Ge launched the more cost-effective Xuantie C906 in 2020, which is also the world's first commercial CPU with a main frequency of more than 1GHz. A year later, Pingtou Ge launched the Xuantie E907 with improved performance.
The market
has been
expecting high-efficiency RISC-V products at the level of Arm Cortex A55, but there has been a lack of them.
Cortex A55 is a product launched by Arm as early as 2017. Until 2022, many products including home appliance SoC and automotive MCU still use Cortex A55 core. This is enough to show the market demand for high-efficiency CPUs. Therefore, at the 2022 Yunqi Conference, Pingtou Ge released the latest generation of high-efficiency CPU Xuantie C908.
Since it is a latecomer product, if it wants to succeed in the market, it must have features that are more attractive to users.
"Xuantie C908 is the product with the most outstanding energy efficiency in the Xuantie family."
Meng Jianyi said that Pingtou promotes technological innovation from two aspects: the entire CPU architecture and AI energy efficiency.
While having higher performance than the Arm A55 of the same level,
Xuantie C908’s higher energy efficiency and native support for AI are its two major killer features in the high-energy-efficiency blue ocean market.
Data shows that the main frequency performance of Hematite C908 is up to 2.0GHz, which is 40% higher than that of Hematite C906, and the energy efficiency is improved by 24%. It natively supports Vector 1.0 and has an energy efficiency advantage of more than 20% compared to Cortex A55.
"RISC-V itself has the advantage of simplicity. To further achieve high energy efficiency under a streamlined architecture, what we can do is to design the entire hardware circuit to be as simple and clever as possible to achieve a more extreme energy efficiency ratio." Meng Jianyi explain.
It is a great challenge to achieve a high-performance and energy-efficient CPU. Pingtou Ge has made many innovations to improve energy efficiency. On the one hand, it chose a 9-level dual-issue pipeline; on the other hand, it adopted instruction fusion technology, which is to turn two instructions into one execution; and in addition, it achieved energy efficiency through the optimization of memory bandwidth.
Native support for AI is Xuantie C908’s trump card for achieving differentiation, and energy efficiency also needs to be considered. Pingtou Ge has made an expanded design based on the standard Vector architecture to support the new Int4 data format, allowing Xuantie C908 to natively support AI while taking into account high energy efficiency.
Customers using C908 no longer need a separate NPU if their AI computing power requirements are below 1TOPS.
This not only saves customers from the trouble of choosing from dozens of NPUs on the market, but also reduces the difficulty of development.
Don’t underestimate the 1TOPS AI computing power.
This computing power is enough to meet the intelligent needs of most current smart cameras, and can also develop the AI scanning pen that has been popular recently.
"An emerging architecture must find emerging markets and emerging applications. Because it
takes
the lead in breaking through the link where
products
on the market
have the most room for development
, it is easier to form a demonstration of large-scale application.
" Meng Jianyi said.
Products that are powered by batteries and require AI are the blue ocean suitable for RISC-V high-energy-efficiency CPUs to take the lead in breaking through. The demand for intelligence in this field is becoming more and more popular, but to make gold in this field, the challenge lies in the ecology.
In addition to differentiated technologies, Pingtou Ge will also provide a complete set of solutions, which is different from Arm's approach. This makes user development easier and allows users to make more free choices.
Nuggets Edge AI
Four major gold mines, ecology is the most powerful tool
Xuantie C908 has very clear application scenarios - intelligent interaction, multimedia terminals, AR/VR, wireless communications, etc. "
Xuantie C908 should be the largest volume product among our mid-to-high-end products.
" Meng Jianyi judged.
The urgency of market demand for products can be seen from the speed of commercialization. Leifeng.com learned that
Xuantie C908 already has many early users,
one of which is Canaan Technology, which has also been working in the RISC-V field for many years. Canaan Technology is developing a mid-to-high-end three-dimensional vision AI chip based on Xuantie C908.
If you want to promote products to a wider market, you need ecological prosperity.
The relationship between the chip and the upper-level ecosystem is like the relationship between the roots and the trunk and branches of a tree.
Only when the chip has sufficient capabilities can the upper-level software ecosystem prosper.
It is a consensus in the industry that
when measuring a processor, not only the hardware should be considered, but
the capabilities of the basic software are also indispensable.
"We provide complete development tools and continue to invest.
This year, our most important progress is that we have a lot of support from third-party commercial tools.
There are also more and more open source tools supporting our processors." Meng Jianyi introduced, "We have cooperated with some very influential companies in the ecosystem. At the same time, the support of third-party commercial and open source tools will become a feature of our processors."
The advantage of both commercial and open source tool chains is that it is easier to solve problems encountered during the development process.
For example, in the RISC-V ecosystem, the debugging problem is not very good, and Pingtou Ge already has a better solution. Pingtou Ge provides HHB compilation tools. This tool can not only make good use of the AI capabilities of Xuantie CPU, but also support third-party AI IP.
Going a step further, TMedia, a cross-platform video vision application framework launched by Pingtou Ge, has the characteristics of high elasticity, high energy efficiency and high scalability, which can better support customers in developing applications.
Only the underlying software tools of the chip are not enough, and it is also necessary to support mainstream operating systems. In the low-power MCU market, the application of RISC-V does not rely on the software ecosystem, which is the key reason why RISC-V can ship 10 billion chips even without a mature ecosystem.
To make money in the energy-efficient edge computing market, the software ecosystem is unavoidable.
This year, a major development of RISC-V is that Google Android natively supports RISC-V processors.
Andriod has a very large and rich mobile ecosystem, and Android's native support for RISC-V has added new space for the application of RISC-V in the mobile market.
"This is of symbolic significance. Google Android's acceptance of RISC-V
is like RISC-V's official entry into the Android ecosystem.
Before that, it was more like a warm-up on the sidelines," said Meng Jianyi.
In fact, Android supports RISC-V, and Pingtou Ge plays a key role.
In addition to the mobile ecosystem, RISC-V is also heading towards the higher-performance PC market. At the 2022 Yunqi Conference,
Pingtou Ge also announced the completion of the first adaptation of RISC-V and the community version of the Unification Operating System
, successfully running the desktop environment and a variety of office and development software.
More than that, not long ago, based on the high-performance SoC prototype "Yiying 1520", Pingtou Ge completed the adaptation of the Dragon Lizard operating system, which is the world's first RISC-V architecture compatible cloud operating system.
From the terminal to the PC and then to the cloud, Pingtou Ge has completed the in-depth adaptation of RISC-V to RTOS, Yocto Linux, Android, Dragon Lizard, Tongxin deepin and other international mainstream and domestic operating systems.
This also means that
Pingtou Ge has removed the obstacles for RISC-V developers to develop end-to-cloud software system adaptation.
Although there is still a lot of work to be done, at least he has taken a pioneering first step. , providing a good foundation for the subsequent prosperity of the RISC-V ecosystem and the enrichment of applications.
"Whether in general computing or resource-constrained computing, the RISC-V ecosystem has established a certain foundation." He Xiaoqing, director of the China Software Industry Association and chairman of the Embedded Systems Branch, believes.
Meng Jianyi believes that when 100 billion RISC-V chips are shipped, the RISC-V ecosystem should have been basically established by then, which will also prove the tenacious vitality of the RISC-V architecture.
As the hardware becomes gradually complete and the software ecosystem develops at an accelerated pace, the key to what surprising applications RISC-V can bring lies in grasping the direction of RISC-V development.
RISC-V also needs to be a 5G model
Ni Guangnan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said at the 2022 Yunqi Conference:
"The open source model has moved from the software field to the hardware field, and RISC-V provides an opportunity for our country to take the initiative in the development of the chip industry.
China must play its due role in the global open source field , to contribute Chinese wisdom, Chinese solutions and Chinese power to break technology monopoly and promote collaborative innovation in the world.
”
Obviously, the core of RISC-V is open source.
To stabilize the RISC-V architecture, different companies need to explore from different angles, otherwise the architecture will have no vitality.
At this time, more institutions or companies that can contribute will play a more important role in the future development of RISC-V.
This is also an opportunity for Chinese companies. Bao Yungang, a researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, believes that
in the past 20 years, China's CPU development has mainly had two models.
One is the high-speed rail model through "introduction-digestion-absorption-reinnovation"
;
the other is independent construction of technology. system and independently build the Beidou model of industrial ecology
.
"
In recent years, a third model has emerged - the 5G model.
More and more domestic companies have spontaneously chosen the open instruction set RISC-V and participated in the construction of the RISC-V global ecosystem, integrating into the international ecosystem, being compatible with international standards, and building international advantages," said Bao Yungang.
Under the 5G mode of the CPU, it is even more necessary for Chinese companies to actively participate in the formulation of the RISC-V standard and contribute more to the RISC-V community.
"Under the constraints of concepts, company size, talent and other conditions, domestic RISC-V companies have relatively less investment and contributions to the open source community than many foreign companies." Many people in the RISC-V industry expressed their opinions on Lei Fengwang said.
"Our software team has gradually found a way and will make certain contributions in software. We will gradually have such a system, and the investment in this system is huge.
We also call on domestic companies to increase their investment in the RISC-V field.
" Meng Jianyi said.
It is reported that Pingtou Ge is a member of the board of directors of the RISC-V International Foundation and leads 11 technical directions in the foundation such as data center, storage management, Android, and security. His importance and quantity rank among the top in the world and the first among Chinese institutions.
Just as x86 and Arm encountered unexpected events during their development, no one knows what kind of surprises RISC-V can bring to the world. However, only by making greater contributions to standard setting and ecological development can we have a better chance of making history.
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