Ni Guangnan: RISC-V has become the most popular architecture in the Chinese CPU space

Ni Guangnan, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that Chinese vendors are making every effort to promote RISC-V solutions that provide powerful arithmetic, "It is no exaggeration to say that today RISC-V is the most popular architecture in the Chinese CPU space, the Chinese chip industry and the entire chip ecosystem will increasingly focus on the RISC-V architecture, and China's huge market will become an important base to support an important base for RISC-V."

In the PC and mobile Internet era, Chinese enterprises experienced an unforgettable "core sour" past, one of the core reasons for this situation is the gap in processor architecture technology, the chip hardware and software ecology has long been monopolized by x86 and ARM. Customized and specialized chips have become the new trend at this stage, and the business models of x86 and ARM are far from being able to meet the market demand.

In 2010, Professor David Patterson's team at UC Berkeley led the development of the RISC-V instruction set and announced that it would be open source, so that any enterprise or developer could use it for free; in 2015, RISC-V was operated by the International Foundation, and the technology began to move from universities to industry.

Chinese companies seized this opportunity, and today hundreds of companies are focusing on or developing with the RISC-V instruction set. 12 of the 22 senior members of the RISC-V Foundation are Chinese companies, including Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, ZTE, and others.

Recently, the first Xuantie RISC-V Ecology Conference held by Alibaba Pingtou was held in Shanghai. Ni Guangnan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said in his speech entitled "Promoting RISC-V Ecology and Collaborative Innovation with the World" that Chinese manufacturers are making every effort to promote RISC-V solutions that provide powerful arithmetic, "It is no exaggeration to say that today RISC-V is the most popular architecture in the Chinese CPU field, and the Chinese chip industry and the entire chip ecology will increasingly focus on RISC-V architecture, and China's huge market will become an important base to support RISC-V."

The following is the full text of academician Ni Guangnan's speech.

Science and technology innovation has now entered a period of acceleration globally, a new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial revolution is reshaping the global economic structure, and science and technology profoundly affects the fate of the country and the well-being of the people. General Secretary Xi pointed out that science and technology are universal and contemporary, and are the common wealth of mankind. We must participate deeply in global science and technology governance and contribute Chinese wisdom. Shape the cultural concept of science and technology for the good, so that science and technology to better promote the well-being of mankind. Emphasize the need to implement a more open and inclusive, mutually beneficial and shared international science and technology cooperation strategy.

Open source has a history of development of about decades. Along with the development of open source as a scientific and open spirit, open source has given a great impetus to the development of the whole information technology and industry. Currently, open source has developed into a new model of global collaborative innovation and a powerful driving force for the development of information technology.

With the development of science and technology, a large number of Chinese engineers are active in the world's open source community and have made positive contributions to the development of open source. For China to play its due role in the global open source field, it must also increase its investment in open source and develop open source foundations, open source communities and open source projects with international influence.

It is especially worth pointing out: the open source model has now moved from the software field to the hardware field.

In recent years, the open source streamlined instruction set architecture RISC-V, developed by Turing Award winner Professor David Patterson at the University of California, Berkeley, has created a new situation for the global chip industry by breaking monopolies, lowering the threshold of chip development, promoting chip talent training, and advancing innovation in the chip industry, as well as providing new opportunities for the development of China's chip industry. Since the release of open source RISC-V, more and more countries, enterprises, universities and research institutes have embraced the RISC-V architecture as a new engine to drive the development of a new generation of information technology.?

Today, we are pleased to see that the RISC-V ecology is growing, mainly in three aspects: software ecology, application ecology, and developer ecology.

First, in the software ecology: now China's industry, academia and research community is rapidly promoting the development of high-performance RISC-V chips, for which the chip design needs to be adapted to the underlying software and application software in all aspects, through the joint efforts of the community, RISC-V and the international mainstream RTOS, Linux, Android and other operating systems have a good adaptation, in China, various operating system manufacturers, such as In China, various OS vendors, such as Kirin, Unisys, Dragon Lizard, Hongmeng, Kukai, etc., are fully supporting it. In order to accelerate the maturity of the RISC-V software ecosystem, we call on the Chinese industry, based on the domestic open source community with a good foundation, to closely unite and pool resources to work together to build the RISC-V software ecosystem and promote the development of RISC-V to high-end applications as soon as possible.

Second, in the application ecology: RISC-V was first used in the IoT field, but is now gradually moving to a broader application area; RISC-V can not only be promoted in industrial control, IoT, smart home and other areas that do not require high computing power, but is now also developing to desktop applications, edge computing and other areas with higher demand for computing power; the field of intelligent network-connected vehicles is considered to be the future chip It is estimated that one smart connected car may use hundreds of CPUs, and the main industry alliances in this field in China are now actively promoting RISC-V-based solutions; with the development of servers and supercomputing, AI training and inference, including applications such as ChatGPT, the demand for powerful computing power is becoming more and more urgent, and given that RISC-V is modular, scalable, and easy to Given RISC-V's advantages of modularity, scalability, ease of customization, and freedom from monopoly constraints and easy supply chain security, Chinese vendors are pushing forward with RISC-V solutions that provide powerful computing power. It is no exaggeration to say that today RISC-V is the most popular architecture in the Chinese CPU field, and the Chinese chip industry and the entire chip ecosystem will focus more and more on RISC-V architecture, and the huge Chinese market will become an important base to support RISC-V.

Third, in terms of developer ecology: Hundreds of companies in China have joined RISC-V International Foundation, and under the organization of RVI, RVI China members have made great contributions in the RISC-V community, driving the development of the RISC-V ecology. In addition, many Chinese universities have offered RISC-V courses for graduate and undergraduate students, vigorously cultivated RISC-V talent, actively participated in the RISC-V base software open source community, and participated in many RISC-V design and application projects. China can produce nearly 10 million graduates every year, and many of them will become the future RISC-V design army, which will be a huge boost to the subsequent development of RISC-V.

Today is the first Xuantie Ecology Conference. Over the past few years, the Flathead GenTechnica processor team has actively promoted RISC-V's global technology evolution and ecological connectivity. Since becoming a member of the RISC-V International Foundation Board of Directors in 2019, Flathead has been actively involved in leading 11 technology directions in the Foundation, including Data Center, Storage Management, Android, and Security. Currently, Xuantie has a complete processor product line that provides high-performance and highly reliable RISC-V IP cores; various types of development boards and modules as well as supporting base tool chains, compilers, operating systems and integrated development environments for software eco-partners and developers. Xuantie has completed the deep adaptation of RISC-V with RTOS, Yocto, Linux, ubuntu, Android, Dragon Lizard Anolis OS, Kirin, Unisys and other operating systems. Currently Xuantie is not only working on embedded systems, but also exploring desktop side and new market opportunities. At present, the Pingtougo chip open community has more than 100,000 developers, which strongly promotes the development of RISC-V ecology.

To sum up, open source and sharing can only promote the prosperous development of RISC-V. China should keep increasing its contribution to the RISC-V community and ecological construction, and contribute Chinese wisdom and Chinese solutions in concert with the world. We look forward to more and more industry partners joining the RISC-V ecological construction in the future to build a better future together!