1. The Monopolized Chip Landscape
At the foundational level of the computer world, the X86 and ARM architectures have built a formidable barrier.
Intel’s X86 controls over 90% of the global PC market, while ARM occupies 95% of the mobile chip market. This technological hegemony hides a fatal risk—X86 is American, ARM is British, but both are influenced by the U.S., constantly reminding us: without an independent architecture, Chinese chips will always be at the mercy of others.
2. The Dawn of Open Source
Later, the emergence of RISC-V broke the 40-year architecture monopoly. This open-source instruction set, which requires no licensing fees and can be freely modified, has given Chinese chip companies hope for a breakthrough. By 2024, the number of members in the China RISC-V Alliance surged to 356, with chip shipments exceeding 5 billion units, as everyone bets on RISC-V chips to reduce their excessive reliance on X86 and ARM chips.
3. The “D-Day” for Automotive Chips
Currently, the large-scale replacement with RISC-V chips is likely to occur in the automotive sector.
Last year, Great Wall Motors announced the successful tape-out of the Zijing M100 automotive-grade MCU, which is based on RISC-V.
Three months later, Dongfeng Motor’s DF30 chip went into mass production, also a RISC-V chip; Guoxin Technology plans to launch the RISC-V chip CCFC3009PT in 2025…
These actions signify that the Chinese chip industry has found a path of “surrounding the city from the countryside”.
Choosing automotive chips as a breakthrough point is backed by precise industrial calculations:
- Safety and Control: The open-source nature of RISC-V allows for greater peace of mind in the automotive supply chain, especially as China’s new energy vehicles develop rapidly, requiring safety and control.
- Market Dividend: China is the world’s largest manufacturing and sales center for new energy vehicles, requiring countless automotive chips each year, with a massive market scale and demand, making replacement advantageous.
- Performance Matching: Automotive-grade MCUs typically operate below 200MHz, and RISC-V can meet these requirements;
- Cost Advantage: RISC-V has low power consumption and high energy efficiency. Under similar processes and close operating frequencies, RISC-V cores outperform ARM cores in key metrics such as performance, die size (cost), and power consumption.
4. The Climb from “Usable” to “User-Friendly”
However, the path to replacement is far from smooth. The “hellish difficulty” of automotive-grade certification is the first hurdle, along with various ecological requirements. After all, for RISC-V chips to truly enter automotive applications, software and hardware must work in synergy, and the software ecosystem must also be considered.
5. A Spark Can Ignite a Prairie Fire
Regardless, the replacement is necessary, as it concerns the safety and control of Chinese chips and the future. No matter how difficult, we must continue. Looking back at history, X86 took 20 years to conquer PCs, and ARM ruled mobile phones for 15 years.
Now, RISC-V’s breakthroughs in the automotive sector may be ushering in a third chip era. This is not just a simple technological replacement, but a profound revolution regarding industrial autonomy; we have no retreat, only forward.
Institutions also predict that within the next 5 to 10 years, RISC-V chips will achieve large-scale deployment, expanding from automobiles to PCs, mobile phones, the Internet of Things, and more.