Although domestic chips are still releasing ARM architecture chips in recent years, in fact they have become increasingly out of touch with ARM's mainstream technology and have gradually fallen behind compared with the world. This means that domestic chips have reached the time to make a decision on whether to continue to develop the ARM architecture. when.
Starting in 2019, ARM first suspended cooperation with a Chinese mobile phone chip company. Later, ARM stopped authorizing many Chinese chip companies after releasing the new chip architecture V9. Subsequently, ARM launched the Neoverse V series specifically for AI chips. There is no authorization for Chinese chips.
The consequence of ARM's approach is that the performance gap between domestic chips and ARM chip companies such as Apple and Qualcomm is getting wider and wider. Recently, a domestic mobile phone company released a mobile phone chip that is also based on the ARM architecture, and its performance is only that of Apple's A17 processor. Half of the time, Qualcomm and MediaTek, which also use ARM public version cores, are 40% ahead. This is certainly related to the backwardness of the chip manufacturing process, but is also inseparable from the backwardness of the chip architecture.
Judging from the fact that ARM has not yet started licensing the latest chip architecture to Chinese chips, it seems that it has gradually become a reality that ARM and Chinese chips will take different paths. Of course, Chinese chips cannot continue to wait. Developing new chip architectures has become a must for Chinese chips. The choice made.
Judging from the current chip architectures developed by domestic chips, there are mainly two types, one is the global open source RISC-V architecture, and the other is the Loongarch architecture completely developed by Loongson. Both of these chip architectures, domestic chips have achieved With significant progress, it is probably inevitable for domestic chips to develop these new chip architectures.
The RISC-V architecture has gained greater recognition among Chinese chips. Domestic chips led by Ali Pingtou have achieved great success in RISC-V chips. RISC-V chips have successfully occupied the market due to their lower cost and power consumption. The domestic IoT chip market has formed a certain ecology.
However, there is a big gap between RISC-V chips and ARM in terms of performance. This will be a big difficulty for Ali Pingtou to promote it to mobile phone chips, PC processors and other markets. As mobile phones are increasingly used, mobile phones The performance of chips is becoming more and more important. If RISC-V cannot catch up with ARM in terms of performance, it will have a greater impact on its prospects.
It is worth noting that although most domestic chip companies have joined the RISC-V camp, what is quite special is that the mobile phone chips and server chips they are currently developing are based on the ARM architecture, which shows that they actually have doubts and are worried about RISC. Can -V's ecological construction compete with ARM? Even though they know that the current ARM V8 architecture is far behind overseas, they still invest in the development of ARM architecture chips.
As for Loongson, it has made great progress in terms of performance. It is said that the performance of the latest 3A6000 has reached the level of the 11th generation Core. Such performance can indeed meet the needs of most users. After all, many people today still use PCs. For Core processors of the 10th generation or earlier, there are even rumors that 50 million domestic PCs will use domestic chips. This should be a boost for Loongson. I hope to see this become a reality soon.
In general, whether domestic chips are passive or active, they must make a choice between ARM, RISC-V architecture and the completely self-developed Loongarch. The development of multiple chip architectures at the same time will consume more resources. After all, the number of Chinese chips Wherever the technical strength lies, it is too difficult to support three chip architectures at the same time.