Since its inception, RISC-V has achieved a considerable market share in the Internet of Things (IoT) field relying on MCUs, and has formed a relatively mature ecosystem. This year, with the commercialization of application products such as laptops, servers, and 10G switches that adopt the RISC-V instruction set, the application range of RISC-V is expanding from low-end to high-end, and the “small ecosystem” based on IoT applications will move towards a larger and more substantial ecosystem.
RISC-V China Summit 2023 Exhibition Site
Expanding High-Performance Applications
If RISC-V is limited to microcontrollers (MCUs), its potential ecosystem is very small, or even “non-existent”. Only by upgrading processing capabilities and applying them in more fields such as PCs and servers can more ecosystem partners be expanded. The meaning of “continuously raising the ceiling of RISC-V” lies here.
At the RISC-V China Summit 2023 media conference, Xu Tao, Chairman and CEO of Sifang Technology, stated that the biggest change in RISC-V this year is its move towards the high-end. For a long time, RISC-V has been “feeling its way across the river with ARM”, and its instruction set architecture has been aligned with ARM. Originally, it was already good performance for RISC-V cores to match the ARM A5 series, but now many cores can match the A7 and even A10 series. High performance has become an important trend in RISC-V’s development in recent years, and some startups are also focusing on high-performance computing.
Regarding the future expansion of RISC-V’s high-performance applications, industry participants believe there are several directions: automotive, AI, machine learning, 5G communications, etc. Among them, data centers are considered to be the scenario with the fastest landing speed. He Ning, Senior Vice President and CTO of Yiswei Computing, stated: “Because there are too many applications on PCs and mobile devices, with the number of apps reaching millions, it is almost impossible to require all application software owners to migrate. However, in high-performance computing, especially in data centers, this possibility exists.” He Ning believes that for industry-specific applications, especially private clouds, the controllability of software ownership and quantity is much stronger than that of open software. In this case, adapting and migrating software will be easier to land than in PC and tablet scenarios.
Lu Jinian, Product Director of SuanNeng Technology, also sees potential for RISC-V in the data center field. His main reason is that the current GPGPU prices used in data centers are too high, and the industry needs products that are lower in cost and higher in performance.
SuanNeng SG2042 Mass Production 64-Core RISC-V Server Chip Development Board
The application of RISC-V in the data center field has made initial progress. For example, the server provided by SuanNeng Technology supports data center applications, providing a sample for high-performance computing using RISC-V and opening up new avenues for RISC-V compilation methods: in the past, RISC-V development often used cross-compilation, which means using two machines, one x86 development machine to write programs and compile, using cross-compilation options with the target code being RISC-V. After compilation, the code is flashed onto the RISC-V development board. However, the server launched by SuanNeng Technology can achieve native compilation, which means placing the program on the RISC-V machine for compilation, and running it directly on the local machine after compilation. This provides great convenience for developers.
According to Yang Jing, Vice President of Ecosystem at Pingtouge Semiconductor Co., Ltd., to achieve high-performance applications, closer collaboration between software and hardware development is needed. As applications expand into higher performance markets and new application scenarios, they may be constrained by immature software ecosystems. Collaboration between software and hardware companies can quickly realize hardware iteration and software complement, achieving mutual synergy in technology, thus accelerating the speed of application expansion.
Enhancing Contribution to Mainstream Software Code
At the recently concluded RISC-V China Summit 2023, many international attendees stated: compared to other regions globally, the RISC-V ecosystem in China is richer and exhibits more vigorous vitality.
Philipp Tomsich, CTO of RISC-V software ecosystem company VRULL GmbH, stated in an interview with China Electronics News: “What impressed me is that China has achieved many innovative results, and many excellent companies and products have attracted wide attention and market recognition.” Such multi-application trials and exploratory scenarios are hard to see in other parts of the world. Yang Jing also stated that the Chinese market differs from the international market, showing a “blooming everywhere” characteristic, with many fields conducting new attempts.
According to data from the RISC-V Foundation, processors using RISC-V chip architecture shipped 10 billion units in 2022. It is predicted that by 2025, the shipment of processors based on the RISC-V architecture will exceed 80 billion units.
Li Jue, Vice President of Market Strategy at Chiprise Technology, stated that many terminal fields in China have already adopted RISC-V cores, including mobile phones, televisions, etc., but many data have not been statistically recorded. Coupled with the fact that Chinese companies account for the largest proportion in the RISC-V International Foundation and China has the largest market globally, the development prospects of RISC-V in this fertile land of China are very promising.
RISC-V China Summit 2023 Exhibition Site
Yang Jing stated that there is potential for RISC-V to play a role in high-performance fields such as automotive, AI, and data centers, but the current market application expansion still lacks a rich supporting software tool set. She believes that on one hand, RISC-V should be promoted towards high-performance processors, and on the other hand, the software ecosystem should continue to be enriched and improved, as both aspects are indispensable.
Hardware application expansion requires software support. Since 2020, RISC-V has entered a software-driven development model. If software is well done, it will help broaden RISC-V application scenarios.
Wu Yanjun, Deputy Director of the Software Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, stated that the IT ecosystem is one with a software amplification effect. Although building an open-source RISC-V software ecosystem may seem to have no direct benefits at times, if the code written by Chinese companies can enter mainstream system code, it will create a very good brand advertising effect, thus greatly enhancing the visibility and influence of the company within the RISC-V software ecosystem.
Therefore, he proposed the suggestion of “actively participating in the construction of open-source communities and contributing code to mainstream upstream software”.
If the code receives support from mainstream software vendors, for example, if the processor code designed by a certain RISC-V company enters the Linux kernel, it can gain support from GCC and LLVM compilers. Ultimately, developers using RISC-V will not need to seek technical support from the original vendor because mainstream software support means developers can directly download, compile, and run from the mainstream community, greatly reducing the cost and pressure of vendor technical support.
This way, there is an opportunity to reduce the cost of expanding the RISC-V ecosystem, help RISC-V realize more application possibilities, and also assist Chinese RISC-V participants in improving their international influence.
