Compiled by | Wu You
Edited by | Li Shuai Fei
Leiphone Network Note:
Ten years ago, the University of California, Berkeley, birthed the open-source instruction set RISC-V, which is completely different from x86 and ARM. A decade later, RISC-V is starting to find its place in the Internet of Things, with some views suggesting that RISC-V will develop into a triad of instruction sets alongside x86 and ARM in the future. However, looking at the present, the commercialization of RISC-V has just begun, the software and ecosystem development are not yet complete, and how long will it take to “dominate a sector”?
Recently, Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, gave an interview to foreign media ZDNet, expressing her attitude and views on the future development of RISC-V. Leiphone Network has compiled this without altering the original meaning of the article.
1
RISC-V, the “unexpected player”,
the great opportunity to change computing
The 1980s was a dazzling era of chip competition, with a flourishing development of various computer chip architectures.
For instance, some of the most outstanding chip architectures at that time included Intel’s x86 processors, IBM’s POWER architecture, processors based on MIPS produced by companies like NEC and Toshiba, Digital Equipment Corp’s Alpha series processors, Sun’s Sparc processors, Motorola’s PowerPC series, and HP’s PA-RISC series.
However, the chip industry has always been a winner-takes-all scenario. After decades of competition, most of these chip architectures have disappeared into history, leaving behind two main processor camps: x86 and ARM. x86 has always belonged to Intel, while ARM was initially sold to the Japanese company SoftBank and is now being sold by SoftBank to Nvidia.
But ten years ago, another important architecture was born.
Professors David Patterson and Krste Asanović developed the “Linux of the chip world”—the RISC-V instruction set at the University of California, Berkeley. This instruction set does not belong to any company; all chip manufacturers can use and modify it freely.
“Just as Linux is the kernel of open software, RISC-V is similar to the kernel of open-source hardware,” said Calista Redmond.
Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International
After ten years of development, RISC-V is gradually moving towards commercialization and gaining attention from large chip companies.
One of RISC-V’s early supporters, the intellectual property startup SiFive, is collaborating with Intel to manufacture RISC-V-based chips in Intel’s new foundry project.
Additionally, the ongoing acquisition of ARM by Nvidia has prompted more chip companies to consider RISC-V. “This will be significant for RISC-V and equally significant for other chip architectures,” said Xilinx CEO Victor Peng in an interview this May.
Calista Redmond believes this is a great opportunity to drive architectural diversity again after the disappearance of diversity in chip architectures since the 1980s. “This is the biggest opportunity to change the computing and hardware landscape that we have seen since the 1980s, and it excites me every day.”
“In the past, many processors were competing to become the core and soul of computing,” Redmond said. “However, whether in early personal computers or later developed mobile phones, everything adopted proprietary architectures, and the nascent open-source architectures at that time did not have all the elements for success.”
“This is a significant change and turning point in computer history, and we are witnessing massive investments.”
2
RISC-V Alliance membership has doubled,
software is the current focus
Calista Redmond, with her extensive hardware experience and deep connections with various parties, has taken on the role of operating the RISC-V Alliance.
About three years ago, Calista Redmond joined the RISC-V Alliance; prior to that, she worked at IBM for 13 years, managing the ecosystem development of IBM’s Z series mainframe business while serving as president of the OpenPOWER Foundation, which aims to build an ecosystem for POWER chips.
In addition, Redmond has served on the board of the Open Mainframe Project for over two years, an organization established in 2015 to bring Linux to mainframes.
This means that Redmond is experienced in building and managing alliances.
“I manage an efficient alliance; part of the work is managing members, and another part is ensuring our membership continues to grow,” Redmond said. “We have a large number of signed members, from students to entrepreneurs, startups, and multinational corporations.”
The number of RISC-V Alliance members has doubled in the past year, exceeding 2000. “This is the motivation for our continued community operation.”
Mark Himelstein, CTO of RISC-V International, shares the same enthusiasm as Redmond for changing the existing computing landscape. “We are at a turning point; due to the rise of IoT and SoC integrated designs, hundreds of millions of cores will be launched this year.” Himelstein told ZDNet in the same interview with Redmond.
“Even if some companies integrate chips onto a single circuit board, they may have ten RISC-V chips for specific purposes,” Himelstein said.
Himelstein also stated that the ability to obtain intellectual property from the expanding ecosystem makes RISC-V chips more flexible, rather than just advancing with a single unlicensed agreement.
Regarding the expansion of the common feature set for all RISC-V users, Himelstein said: Don’t copy, innovate.
“We are tracking and focusing on what the community considers important,” Himelstein said, “We have expanded our software work, and there are currently fifteen software working groups.”
According to Himelstein, the alliance’s work on software includes a series of extensions to the RISC-V instruction set specification and software. “We are expanding from basic hardware elements, tools, and design resources to other aspects of software and ecosystems, including cross-industry operating systems, specific applications, and workloads, which are all signs of success.”
Moreover, the rise of open-source is helping the development of the software ecosystem.
“We already have operating systems that are proficient in running on various architectures,” she pointed out. “Canonical, Ubuntu, and SuSE have invested in various architectures, with RISC-V architecture clearly included.”
3
RISC-V progress is hard to measure, expected
ecosystem developmentto outpace x86 and ARM
Redmond views not only the increasing volume of development as progress but also the increasingly complex parts as progress. “RISC-V started in academia and then quickly turned to embedded and other small, simple, low-power designs.”
“Interesting things are happening; we see RISC-V surging in all types of computing, not limited to one side, but developing into multi-core, the largest systems, the largest chips, and extended products, from embedded to enterprise, including workloads that even proprietary architectures find hard to surpass.”
“From soldering irons to supercomputers, it is everywhere,” Himelstein added.
The development from soldering irons to supercomputers is still advancing as Redmond builds an alliance to protect and nurture the RISC-V instruction set, and the alliance itself has no commercial ambitions.
Regarding Nvidia’s impending acquisition of ARM, Redmond pointed out that Nvidia is a “long-time supporter of RISC-V” and has expressed its “strategic intent to continue using RISC-V”.
“An interesting perspective is that sometimes RISC-V is a case of having it both ways,” Redmond said. “In some cases, the same chip can have both RISC-V and other architectures simultaneously.” Himelstein agreed and noted that many people are “multi-faith”.
Some progress of RISC-V is hard to see. Because no matter how successful RISC-V proves to be, it is impossible to know the full extent of its usage, as ARM and other commercial technology providers require their licensed enterprises to sign documents, but RISC-V users do not need to disclose usage.
Although RISC-V International also requires suppliers to disclose usage, it is based on the suppliers’ willingness and does not forcibly require disclosure.
When asked if measuring RISC-V’s progress is difficult to describe, Redmond replied, “Properly speaking, we cannot show every association member’s roadmap and chip design plans using this instruction set.”
However, she listed some public facts, such as the European Processor Initiative trying to adopt open-source computing methods, with RISC-V participating; in the Asia-Pacific region, there are many applications of RISC-V emerging, from mobile phones to automobiles, especially in Japan’s automotive supply chain.
Pakistan has announced RISC-V as its national chip architecture, while India has a RISC-V-based Shakti chip project. In North America, many multinational companies are incorporating RISC-V as part of their overall chip strategy, including Nvidia and Google.
It is evident that the open-source instruction set can benefit cloud computing companies like Google and Amazon. Alibaba is the only publicly disclosed cloud company using RISC-V. Additionally, one of the proposers of RISC-V, Professor Patterson, has served as an advisor within Google for many years, responsible for developing TPUs for machine learning.
When asked if other cloud companies are developing RISC-V, Redmond stated that it is temporarily inconvenient to disclose.
In Redmond’s view, RISC-V’s steady development is due to the alliance she is helping to build, which can promote the construction of the RISC-V ecosystem, and its speed can be much faster than that of x86 or ARM.
“Back in the 1980s, there was an intense ‘mixed battle’ of processors, and that reshuffle was primarily completed by Intel and later ARM, both spending decades building their ecosystems,” Redmond said.
“This is also a problem that RISC-V needs to face, but I can assure you that the ecosystem development of RISC-V and the resolution of compatibility and portability issues will not take decades.”
“These are all things we can foresee,” she said.
Leiphone Network compilation, original link
https://www.zdnet.com/article/risc-v-ceo-the-biggest-opportunity-to-change-computing-since-the-1980s/
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