Author: Old Mr. G
According to legend, the black iron epee is made of "meteor from outside the sky", that is, black iron. It is black iron all over. Four catties, Dugu seeks defeat. Before the age of forty, he will be invincible in the world.
After Yang Guo acquired Xuantie, his martial arts advanced greatly, and his status as a master of a generation was thus established. It is written in "The Legend of Condor Heroes" that Yang Guo slashed twice with his sword, split the golden wheel and iron wheel in half, followed by two steps, and swung his sword to chop down on the head of the national teacher. The national teacher stood on the ground, completely powerless to resist. Da'erba raised his golden pestle, Huo Dou raised his steel fan, and they both supported the black iron sword. Daerba and Huo Du fell to their knees on the ground, their backs seemed to be broken, and the joints in their bodies were rattling.
Ali Pingtouge and Xuantie RISC-V are also as thrilling as the legend of martial arts.
Chip rivers and lakes and RISC-V
Currently, the global chip architecture pattern is dominated by Intel and Arm. The X86 architecture of the American company Intel dominates the two major markets of personal computers and servers; the Arm architecture of the British company is popular in the smartphone market. In the past few decades, Intel has formed an alliance with Microsoft, and Arm has formed an alliance with Apple and Google, becoming the de facto standard in their respective markets.
RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture (ISA) based on the principle of reduced instruction set computing (RISC), led by Professor David A. Patterson of the University of California, Berkeley. Contrary to most ISAs, the RISC-V ISA is freely available to businesses and developers, allowing anyone to design, manufacture and sell RISC-V chips and software.
The RISC-V Foundation manages RISC-V, open source adopts a loose BSD protocol, and enterprises are completely free to use it.
The RISC-V architecture adheres to a simple design philosophy: the RISC-V basic instruction set has only more than 40 instructions, plus other modular extension instructions, a total of dozens of instructions. The specification document for RISC-V is only 145 pages long, and the "privileged architecture document" is only 91 pages long. At the same time easy to port *nix, modular design.
Calista Redmond, CEO of the RISC-V Foundation, revealed that by the end of 2020, 93 RISC-V chips (SoC, IP and FPGA) have been launched globally, covering cloud, mobile, high-performance computing, machine learning, industries such as autonomous driving . According to Caixin, RISC-V has attracted more than 500 global companies including Google, Alibaba, Samsung, Huawei, Nvidia, and Western Digital to participate in research and development.
Ni Guangnan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, once predicted that in the CPU field, a three-point pattern of Intel (x86), Arm, and RISC-V will be formed in the future. According to the forecast of Calista Redmond, CEO of the RISC-V International Foundation, RISC-V architecture chips are expected to exceed 80 billion in 2025. Counterpoint analyst William Li said: "RISC-V processors will continue to gain adoption in multiple categories. But we believe that in the short term, IoT remains the most critical application area. By 2025, its adoption rate may exceed 25%." %, mainly due to its superior flexibility, scalability, and power optimization. Other areas where RISC-V may be adopted include: industrial electronics, automotive, and HPC (high-performance computing).”
RISC-V and IoT Scenarios
Caixin Securities Research Report pointed out that in addition to open source and cost advantages, the acceleration of the localization of semiconductors is an important reason for RISC-V to gain opportunities in China this round. The open source nature of RISC-V and its gradual acceptance by global mainstream manufacturers make it feasible for Chinese chip manufacturers to achieve technical autonomy in some fields through the RISC-V architecture.
The RISC-V ecological construction is actually a good opportunity for the ecological construction of China's semiconductor upstream and downstream industry chains. The Internet of Things scenarios that RISC-V is currently facing do not have high requirements for chip manufacturing processes, which just brings market opportunities to a group of domestic EDA companies newly established in China in recent years. Chips are a high-tech technology, but keeping chip companies or industries alive is a more real business. RISC-V is on the eve of ecological prosperity, and the successful application will greatly boost the market's confidence in RISC-V. In the field of MCU/industrial control, Aptec is making a name for itself; in the field of AI/autonomous driving chips, Canaan has successfully prototyped; in the field of vision/voice, Alipay, Haier, and Youdao are making RISC-V realize its potential. A wave of RISC-V has arrived.
At present, the wave of AIoT has swept across. As the most matching RISC-V architecture, it has begun to achieve development results in the field of AIoT. RISC-V may be the key to the Internet of Everything in the AIoT era and the key to expanding the IoT ecosystem. Ali Pingtouge's exploration and layout on RISC-V is of great significance for advancing the AIoT strategy.
Brother Pingtou and Xuantie RISC-V
Let's turn our attention back to the birth of Brother Pingtou, and review the history a little bit.
At the Yunqi Conference in 2017, Alibaba DAMO Institute was established, investing 100 billion yuan in three years, based on the research of basic science, disruptive technology and applied technology.
In 2018, Ali made a major announcement that it would integrate the previously acquired Zhongtian Microsystems Co., Ltd. and the self-developed chip business of DAMO Academy into a new chip company-Pingtouge Semiconductor Co., Ltd., to promote the cloud-integrated chip layout . "Brother Pingtou" is another name for the honey badger. He is known as the leader of the animal world, a representative of "people who don't talk too much", and "the most fearless animal in the world".
Ali said, "chips are one of the important research and development directions planned by Dharma Institute at the beginning of its establishment . Promote and build ecology.”
In July 2019, Pingtouge released the industry's most powerful RISC-V processor Xuantie 910, and announced the Pratt & Whitney chip plan to fully open the IP Core of Xuantie 910; in August 2019, Pingtouge released the SoC chip platform " Wujian" provides one-stop chip design services for the AIoT era; in September, Pingtouge will launch a new cloud AI reasoning chip to provide extreme computing power for artificial intelligence scenarios.
The open source Xuantie RISC-V series processors proves that Ali has the ability to promote ecological development and help the Internet of Everything in the chip industry, and will benefit the global RISC-V community.
At the 2022 Yunqi Conference, Alibaba Pingtouge Semiconductor released the new RISC-V high-efficiency processor Xuantie C908. Xuantie C908 leads the world in computing energy efficiency, which is more than 20% higher than that of processors with the same performance in the industry. It can better meet the computing power requirements of the low-carbon era and can be widely used in scenarios such as intelligent interaction, multimedia terminals, AR/VR, and wireless communications.
Xuantie RISC-V has been released, and there is a lot to do
The establishment of RISC-V is to create and serve a more open chip architecture and ecology, and Chinese companies have played an important role. Brother Pingtou leads 11 major technical directions in RISC-V, and has produced new contributions with partners in terms of Vector1.0 and security standards.
Xuantie 910 is the pioneer of high-performance RISC-V processors, expanding the boundaries of RISC-V performance and applications. In terms of processor design technology, Xuantie 910 has developed into a 3-launch parallel architecture on the basis of the original high-performance processor 2-launch, the depth of the pipeline has been developed from 10 stages to 12 stages, and the unit performance has increased by more than 40%, reaching 7.1 Coremark /MHz, the working frequency reaches 2.5GHz, and the overall index has been upgraded to a higher level than the original technology. The performance meets the requirements of 5G, network communication, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving and other fields.
In March 2020, thanks to the innovation of technology, the design method of Xuantie 910 was included in ISCA 2020, the top meeting of computer architecture.
RISC-V is also suitable for AI scenarios: from the explosion of ChatGPT to AIGC, applications have created a strong demand for hardware. Higher performance, lower power consumption, and greener are precisely the characteristics of RISC-V. semico research says RV's AI SOCs will grow to 25 billion by 2027 with a 73.6% CARG. Brother Pingtou has done a lot of work in the development of AI on RISC-V, from the 4 firsts of MLPerf, to our AI features, to running AI functions on Android 12, to the AI application chip Canaan, etc.
Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Conference
On March 2, Ali Pingtouge will hold the 2023 Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Conference for the first time in Shanghai. With the theme of "Open Connectivity", this conference will comprehensively demonstrate the latest developments in the RISC-V ecosystem and successful commercialization cases in various industries, and release the latest achievements in RISC-V technology and applications. At the meeting, distinguished guests such as Ni Guangnan, David Patterson, Calista Redmond, Xie Xiaoqing, and Meng Jianyi will jointly discuss the new direction of RISC-V ecological development.
Ali Pingtouge held the first 2023 Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Conference to promote the unification of RISC-V ecological upstream and downstream standards, and the third wave of chips led by the open RISC-V architecture officially entered China.
At present, the wave of AIoT has swept across. As the most matching RISC-V architecture, it has begun to achieve development results in the field of AIoT. RISC-V may be the key to the Internet of Everything in the AIoT era and the key to expanding the IoT ecosystem. Pingtouge's exploration and layout on RISC-V proves that Ali has the ability to promote ecological development and help the Internet of Everything in the chip industry, which will benefit the global RISC-V community.
At the same time, RISC-V has a huge imagination. Brother Pingtou will also continue to explore the possibility of the RISC-V architecture in more scenarios and fields, gradually moving from the edge to the center, and further broaden the imagination of RISC-V.
The Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Conference welcomes relevant ecological partners to come, let's talk about swords and swords, and point the sword to the world.
