As China continue to come under pressure from US export controls, a fully alternative ecosystem with little or no-US controllable inputs is coming into focus, but many tech/ecosystem challenges remain to creating alternatives to key pieces such as core processor IP. A thread.🧵
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Chinese industrial planning officials have been pushing the open source RISC-V architecture for some time, and there are already several major industrial consortia devoted to the technology, and the architecture is becoming more popular, competing with Arm and x86.
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Huawei, ZTE, Tencent, UNISOC, Alibaba Cloud, Futurewei Technologies, the CAS Institute of Computing Technology, and Chengwei Capital are members of RISC-V International Association.
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RISC-V has made some inroads into: communication infrastructure, networking devices; medical and healthcare; aerospace and military; consumer electronics and home appliances; computing and storage; industrial; automotive and transportation.
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The development/deployment of RISC-V based semiconductors in China so far is fragmented, and development of reference standards that can really compete with Arm IP appears to be goal of recent government efforts, also spurred by the ratcheting up of US export controls.
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A new coalition has been recently formed, which includes Chinese tech titans Alibaba and Tencent, to develop a high-performance RISC-V reference IP architecture aimed squarely at competing with Arm’s IP.
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The so-called “Xiangshan” design, once optimized, is intended to compete directly with Arm's top-end Cortex-A76 processor cores. Last year first generation Xiangshan chips were taped out at Taiwan’s TSMC using the firm’s 28 nm process.
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Chinese firms such as Alibaba and Tencent, are already fielding RISC-V based designs, including the Alibaba T-Head 910 series of CPUs, that are also manufactured by TSMC. A 910 series CPU debuted in October in a laptop.
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Last year, Alibaba’s T-Head chip design arm released the source code for its XuanTie E902, E906, C906, and C910 RISC-V processor cores.
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The Alibaba Roma RISC-V laptop, announced last summer contains a quad-core processor and full features of the type usually associated with an Intel or AMD CPU-based computer.
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In addition, last week, at an industry event, 11 Chinese semiconductor companies unveiled their latest chips based on RISC-V. The new RISC-V chips “represent China’s advanced level of integrated circuit (IC) designs”, according to China RISC-V Industry Consortium,
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The Consortium is made up of local RISC-V start-ups and Shanghai-based integrated circuit (IC) design contractor VeriSilicon Holdings.
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However, though Xiangshan series will continue to improve, it will be some time before RISC-V designs can compete with full line of Arm cores, which continue to dominate IP space+ are widely used, particularly for advanced apps like smartphone System on a Chip (SOC) designs.
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Krste Asanović, professor of computer science at the UC Berkeley's claimed during a keynote speech at Supercomputing Conference 2022 that in 2-3 years RISC-V core's performance will surpass existing rivals. His claim was met with some skepticism by the industry.
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Commercial chip companies estimate that a realistic timeline is around five years or even longer before RISC-V will take a significant portion of the market.
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Even if RISC-V takes off, China faces significant hurdles in overcoming US controls on semiconductor manufacturing equipment for foundries that to make higher end chips using the architecture. See here:
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In 2020 the RISC-V Foundation, which promotes the use of the architecture, moved its headquarters to Switzerland, primarily to avoid the potential for the open source architecture to fall under US export controls or other restrictions.
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RISC-V will thus play a major role in the future of China's semiconductor industry development + be part of whatever alternative system emerges that will have a significantly lower dependence on US + other foreign origin technology. How far this process can go remains unclear.
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@pstAsiatech
It’s not a question of “if” RISC-V takes off, but “when”. Krste speaks with authority. His company - SiFive - has new cores that will already compete in data center applications, and in 2-3 years will dominate. ARM is history.
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