The Genesis of RISC-V in China

The Genesis of RISC-V in China

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The Genesis of RISC-V in China

RISC-V has entered the bronze age, and the various contradictions and disputes that existed before will be magnified and intensified during this period.
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Author | Wu You

Editor | Cen Feng

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Tech enthusiasts who treasure it and

Academics preparing for the future

In the fall of 2015, Guo Xiongfei, who had a great interest in open-source chip design, attended the Open RISC Developers and Users Conference (ORConf 2015) held in Switzerland during a trip to Europe and gave a simple speech.
The original purpose of attending the conference was to discuss and exchange OpenRISC-related technologies with developers on the other side of the Eurasian continent, but unexpectedly, he came into contact with a team from Berkeley, California, introducing RISC-V. After the meeting, he suddenly realized that RISC-V might be a better open-source instruction set than OpenRISC that he was looking for. RISC-V seemed to have achieved what OpenRISC had not done in more than a decade in just four years.
After returning from his trip to Europe, he often used his spare time to learn related information and did some practice and attempts. From then on, the seed of RISC-V was planted in his heart.
Guo Xiongfei’s Zhihu account introduces himself as an “open-source non-fanatic enthusiast,” and he has had a long-standing interest in open-source CPUs. During his junior year, he wrote an 8-bit RISC CPU, named “MTM Multithreaded Processor,” for which he designed a dedicated logo and a complete ISA manual, open-sourced it online, and participated in the OpenHW open-source hardware competition. With the accumulation from this project, Guo Xiongfei, who majored in computer science, found a job as a Digital IC engineer after graduation, fulfilling his dream of working in chip design.
In the early 1980s, scholars such as David Patterson from the University of California, Berkeley, and John L. Hennessy from Stanford University began attempts to simplify traditional CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing), leading to the birth of RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing), and thus the CISC vs. RISC debate, which has had a profound impact on the history of information technology, began.

The Genesis of RISC-V in China

David Patterson and John Hennessy with their co-authored book “Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach,” taken around 1991, photo source: ACM
The design methodology of RISC has also gained widespread recognition, and the academic community generally believes that RISC has replaced CISC as the mainstream. In the industry, Intel adopted the RISC architecture for its Pentium processors. ARM, which is known as one of the

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