Andes Technology successfully held the 2024 RISC-V Symposium and is optimistic about the future of AI and automobiles

Andes Technology has delivered a satisfactory answer to the market. Since its IPO in 2017, its turnover has grown fivefold in the past seven years.

When asked about the reason, Andes Technology said, "With close observation of market dynamics and technological trends and decisive decision-making, the company flexibly adjusted its strategic positioning and seized emerging opportunities."

And this emerging opportunity is the RISC-V architecture. Andes Technology introduced the RISC-V architecture when it upgraded its fifth-generation AndeStar V5 in 2016. According to statistics, in 2023, despite the inventory pressure faced by the semiconductor industry, the cumulative shipments of SoCs embedded with AndesCore still exceeded 14 billion. According to the SHD marketing report released in January 2024, Andes Technology has a market share of 30% among RISC-V IP suppliers, making it the world's largest RISC-V CPU IP supplier.

In recent years, RISC-V has been experiencing rapid expansion in advanced fields such as automotive electronics, information security technology, and artificial intelligence, and its development in high-end application processors is also highly anticipated. SHD Group predicts that by 2030, RISC-V-based SoC shipments will increase sharply to 16.2 billion, and corresponding revenue is expected to reach US$92 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 44% and 47% respectively. It can be seen that the significant growth trend of the RISC-V architecture has further promoted the detonation of a technological revolution.

Recently, Andes Technology held the ANDES RISC-V CON seminar in Shenzhen and Shanghai, and worked with partners to give an in-depth introduction to the changes in the RISC-V market and future development trends.

3A1S becomes a trend

Andes Technology Chairman and CEO Lin Zhiming discussed the topic of "RISC-V's rich solutions bring a bright future" and how the RISC-V instruction set standard, as the foundation of the processor silicon IP, platform and software and hardware environment ecosystem, has guided the development of rich chips and system products. Lin Zhiming is very optimistic about the development of RISC-V in the fields of AI, Application Processor, Automotive and Security (3A1S).

On the left is Andes Technology Chairman and CEO Lin Zhiming, and on the right is Andes Technology General Manager Dr. Su Hongmeng

For example, for AI, RISC-V is becoming an efficient choice in AI applications, including smart cameras, smart homes, surveillance systems, and even autonomous driving. RISC-V has demonstrated its flexibility and importance.

Dr. Su Hongmeng, general manager of Andes Technology, said that in the field of AI, the development strategy of RISC-V is to make existing technologies more compact and efficient. And continuously optimize and update them to adapt to new models and algorithms. Su Hongmeng gave an example, saying that early AI applications mainly relied on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and in recent years, Transformer models have also begun to be widely used. Therefore, the RISC-V technical team is integrating these new algorithms into its architectural environment to ensure that its processors can execute the latest AI models.

In terms of AI, Andes Technology is at the forefront of the industry. For example, in 2023, it successfully launched the first RISC-V vector processor on the market - AndesCore AX45MPV, which supports up to 1024-bit vectors, compared to Arm's NEON which only has 256 bits.

As a customer of Andes Technology, Meta started to cooperate with Andes Technology when the first generation of MTIA chips were launched. According to the paper Meta first published on AI chips, it is clearly stated that each MTIA chip has 64 PEs; each PE has two Andes AX25-V100 core processors of Andes Technology. There are 128 Andes IPs in one MTIA chip to process AI computing functions, showing that the strength of Andes Technology's RISC-V IP computing processors has been recognized by major European and American manufacturers. It is reported that many customers around the world are currently using Andes Technology's products for data center planning.

As shown in the figure, Meta's vector and scalar processors are both products of Andes Technology.

In addition, Andes Technology also announced the launch of a new product line AndesAIRE in 2023, including the first-generation artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) hardware accelerator IP AndesAIRE AnDLA I350 (Andes Deep Learning Accelerator), and the neural network software development kit AndesAIRE NN SDK.

Andes Technology's RISC-V AI processors are divided into multiple product lines according to different applications and computing power requirements.

Automobile is another application that Andes Technology has high hopes for. Currently, RISC-V architecture is mainly used in a variety of applications in the automotive field, including instrument panels, in-car monitoring, keyless entry, lighting control, pressure detection, ADAS, and general MCU. Lin Zhiming also said that any new technology usually starts with simple applications. As the technology matures and is verified, it will gradually expand to more complex application scenarios. Therefore, RISC-V still has more room for imagination.

Andes Technology's past and future blueprints for automotive functional safety applications. Currently, ASIL-B products have been launched and will evolve towards ASIL-D in the future.

Andes Technology Revenue Breakdown

At present, Andes Technology's annual revenue has exceeded NT$1 billion. According to statistics, AI-related revenue accounts for nearly 40% of the company's revenue, while this proportion will be 28% in 2021. Currently, 63% of the company's revenue comes from IP licensing, 22% from IP royalties, and another 15% from service revenue.

As shown in the figure, in terms of licensing, RISC-V has clearly become the company's main force, but the current customer production has not yet increased, so the revenue from royalties is relatively small. At present, Andes Technology's growth strategy is to adopt a dual-engine approach, that is, to develop its own RISC architecture and RISC-V architecture at the same time. Among them, the company's own RISC architecture brings about 30% of its annual turnover, while the RISC-V architecture contributes about 70% of its turnover, showing the important position of RISC-V in the company's business.

Lin Zhiming also said that processor IP has a very obvious long-tail effect, just like the V3 processor, after a period of hard work, there will be continuous revenue, even if no new products are developed. Therefore, he is very optimistic about the continued profitability of RISC-V.

You don’t have to raise cows to drink milk

Customized design services are also an aspect that Andes Technology particularly emphasizes, and the current revenue accounts for 15% of the company. Due to the flexibility of RISC-V, companies can choose to purchase or develop RISC-V IP cores according to their own needs. At present, these two modes and hybrid modes exist, and companies can flexibly choose according to their own needs.

However, Lin Zhiming also said that although companies such as Seagate and Western Digital began to adopt self-developed RISC-V, they later chose to outsource some or all of their solutions. He emphasized that there is no free lunch in the world, and there is no need to open a farm just to drink milk, so companies should consider the ratio of input and return and choose the most economical and effective solution.

The founding spirit of Andes Technology is to break the situation where processor technology is monopolized by a single company and to encourage companies to choose the most appropriate model based on their own resources and leadership decisions.

Su Hongmeng suggested that as RISC-V technology continues to advance, it is best to cooperate with professional service providers who focus on this field, especially as corporate needs become more and more stringent, requiring faster, smaller, and more power-efficient product specifications, as well as various types of support and services.

For this reason, Andes Technology's customers not only choose its standard products, but also cooperate with Andes Technology to customize products according to their own needs, which also constitutes an important source of revenue for Andes Technology.

Large ecosystem

The growing ecosystem is an important milestone in the development of RISC-V, and this achievement is largely due to the close cooperation and mutual support of the RISC-V community. As an open source instruction set architecture, RISC-V encourages collaboration and knowledge sharing among community members, which provides a powerful platform for companies like Andes Technology to promote technological innovation and product development. By applying RISC-V's vector instruction set, Andes Technology is able to develop high-performance processors to meet the market's demand for high-speed data processing and AI applications.

For example, Andes Technology's seminar invited many partners and customers to discuss the future of RISC-V, covering various market segments including software, hardware, services, and development, including HPMicro, MetaSilicon, ResilTech, SGS, S2C, Siemens EDA, Skyechip, Shim Computing, Synopsys (Imperas), TASKING, TrustKernel, IAR, and MachineWare.

The maturity of the RISC-V ecosystem is reflected in many aspects. In the fields of microcontrollers (MCU), network applications, Internet of Things (IoT) and security, the software and hardware support is already quite complete, showing the robustness of the RISC-V ecosystem. Lin Zhiming pointed out that although RISC-V may still have some gaps in certain tool chains and user habits compared to other mature architectures such as Arm, this is more of a psychological barrier and habit problem rather than a technical problem. As engineers gradually become familiar with RISC-V and recognize its advantages, these barriers tend to gradually disappear.