Alibaba's Pingtou Ge finally has a new weapon, RISC-V processor to help 5G development

On July 25, Alibaba's semiconductor company Pingtou Ge officially released XuanTie910, calling it the industry's most powerful RISC-V processor. XuanTie910 can be used to design and manufacture high-performance end chips for applications in 5G, artificial intelligence, and autonomous driving.

Since the birth of the semiconductor industry, it has undergone many changes in the past few decades, and each change was driven by application scenarios: the PC era made Intel successful, the mobile Internet era made Arm and Qualcomm successful, and now we have entered the AIoT era, Pingtou Ge has taken the lead in taking a big step.

Chips are one of the most advanced fields in modern science and technology. Many companies are deterred by the large investment in R&D and the long commercial cycle. In recent years, due to the increasing variety and complexity of IP and the lack of universal interfaces, the process from IP to system integration verification and software debugging has become more time-consuming and investment-intensive. This has promoted a revolution that started from the upstream of chips.

In this transformation, the open source RISC-V processor has become a hot topic among companies.

Born at the University of California, Berkeley, RISC-V has been enthusiastically supported by developers and widely followed by manufacturers since its launch due to its advantages such as open source, flexibility and low cost. Especially in recent years, with the support of AIoT and governments of various countries, RISC-V has shown a trend of spreading like wildfire.

Compared to most instruction sets, the RISC-V instruction set can be used freely for any purpose, allowing anyone to design, manufacture, and sell RISC-V chips and software.

Although this is not the first open source instruction set, the potential and support it demonstrates already have a domineering aura.

On the one hand, because its unique design is suitable for more modern computing devices, such as warehouse-scale cloud computers, high-end mobile phones and tiny embedded systems.

On the other hand, RISC was designed with performance and power efficiency in mind, so the instruction set also has a lot of supporting software, which solves the common weaknesses of new instruction sets.

As an open source processor architecture, processor developers around the world can make ideal processor products based on the RISC-V architecture. This scalable and customizable feature is particularly important for AIoT chips with different scene-driven, performance and power requirements. Pingtou Ge is one of the earliest chip companies in China to enter this field.

But unlike other chip companies, Pingtou Ge's "chip manufacturing" has consistently followed Alibaba's mission of "making business easy". At this press conference, Pingtou Ge announced the Inclusive Chip Plan, which further lowers the threshold for companies to design chips based on the open source RISC-V:

• The XuanTie 910 IP Core is fully open to developers around the world, who can download the FPGA code of the processor for free to quickly carry out chip prototyping and architectural innovation;

  
  

• At the same time, Pingtou Ge has also created a domain-specific SoC chip platform, providing software and hardware resources including CPU IP, SoC platform and algorithms, and providing different levels of chip services for enterprises and developers in different AIoT scenarios.

The ultimate goal is to make chips that are easy to make.

This is also Alibaba's experience in repeatedly exploring new areas and achieving success. From Alibaba B2B Taobao Alipay to Alibaba Cloud and Cainiao, they are all continuations of this platform model and infrastructure thinking.

It can be said that Alibaba's Pingtou Ge has chosen the most suitable path for itself in the face of the trend of the times.

But this is a path that only giants like Alibaba are capable of taking.

In a nutshell, Pingtou Ge wants to make chips more accessible.

Making chips for the general public is a very ambitious goal, which requires not only sufficient technical reserves, but also a strong ecological capability. For most chip companies, it is difficult to have both.

Pingtou Ge's advantage lies in the fact that its core team has more than ten years of experience in CPU and chip research and development, and has long been engaged in the research and development of self-developed instruction architecture, CPU microarchitecture and system chip products, and has developed a total of 7 embedded CPU IP cores; at the same time, these products have been verified by large-scale mass production, with more than 100 authorized customers and cumulative sales of more than one billion chips. These chips are widely used in machine vision, industrial control, vehicle terminals, mobile communications, multimedia, wireless access and information security, and their main customers are first-tier chip design companies.

Take XuanTie 910 as an example. Judging from the test results of mainstream benchmark platforms, XuanTie 910 is the most powerful RISC-V processor to date, with performance that is no less than that of Arm's high-end products. The reason why it can achieve a breakthrough in performance is due to Pingtou Ge's past technical accumulation in self-developed instruction sets (in-depth understanding of processor architecture, tool chain and development environment, etc.) and IP Core's large-scale commercial experience (excellence in developing processor products with an "application-driven" approach).

"Overall, through the deep integration of software and hardware, Pingtou Ge can deeply optimize all aspects of the processor, SoC chip architecture, and operating system, providing a full-chip architecture with good performance, low power consumption, and low cost, and providing infrastructure for customized chips," Pingtou Ge pointed out.

From the perspective of chip R&D needs, the above is enough to support Pingtou Ge to open up new territory in the RISC-V field, and Pingtou Ge has indeed achieved impressive results in this field. Earlier, the company has launched the world's first embedded RISC-V core 902 with TEE, which has been highly recognized by customers. At the same time, they have also planned multiple series of products such as low, medium and high-end to further provide support for chip manufacturers.

If 902 is Pingtou Ge's first experience with the RISC-V architecture, then the Xuantie 910 released this time is more like a masterpiece.

According to the introduction, Hentie 910 integrates the product-proven instruction technology in the self-developed architecture with the RISC-V reduced instruction technology. Compared with the original RISC-V, it is more stable and reliable in terms of instructions, and has a performance improvement of more than 20%.

In terms of processor design technology, Hematite 910 has developed a 3-issue parallel architecture based on the original high-performance processor 2-issue, and the pipeline depth has been developed from 10 levels to 12 levels. The unit performance has been improved by more than 40% to 7.1 Coremark/MHz, and the operating main frequency has reached 2.5GHz. The overall indicators have been improved to a higher level than the original technology.

From the introduction of Pingtou Ge, we can see that the emergence of Hematite 910 not only lowers the threshold of processors in high-performance AIoT chips, but also plays an important role in 5G, network communications, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving and other fields. It can more than double the chip performance and reduce the chip cost by half.

Against the backdrop of high chip design costs, this is undoubtedly a huge benefit to the industry.

In the product development process, chip development is only the first step, and a series of issues such as systems and software will be involved in the follow-up. Especially in the current AIoT era, cloud data processing is playing an increasingly important role. How to build a service from end to cloud has become the pursuit of major manufacturers, and this is exactly what Pingtou Ge, or Alibaba, is good at.

Pingtou Ge is positioned as the infrastructure provider of future AIoT chips. In addition to the CPU, the company has also launched a full-stack solution that integrates CPU, memory, OS and algorithms. Among them, AliOS can achieve low-power and low-cost cloud access. Cloud-end integration is a reflection of Pingtou Ge's basic software and hardware capabilities and the foundation of inclusive AIoT chips.

"Alibaba Cloud is the largest cloud service provider in China and already has rich application ecosystem resources in the cloud. Products based on the Pingtou Ge chip platform can be naturally connected to Alibaba Cloud, and will form new product forms after docking with the cloud application ecosystem." Pingtou Ge emphasized.

Pingtou Ge's end-side strength, combined with the NPU announced by Alibaba in Hangzhou Yunqi last year, will provide developers with a convenient and reliable solution by working on both the end and the cloud. It is revealed that the cloud NPU will be released later this year.

According to the reporter, in terms of RISC-V, Pingtou Ge will combine the rich experience accumulated in its self-developed instruction architecture to promote the design of a new generation of AIoT instruction architecture, and continuously launch new commercializable CPUs, so that the end-side processors will achieve more synergy with the cloud-based NPU chips.

The "Xuantie" also originates from Jin Yong's martial arts novels and is in line with the Alibaba system.

This is also the world's number one sword in Jin Yong's Jianghu, and the meaning behind it is:

A heavy sword has no edge, and great skill is not elaborate.

It is used to house the CPU IP Core, and its temperament is perfect.