Recently, Ni Guangnan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, called for promoting the construction of a new pattern in the world's mainstream CPU field.

Ni Guangnan believes that with the development of AGI (artificial general intelligence), the construction of AI computing power center in China is booming, and the new DSA server based on RISC-V architecture is likely to replace the traditional x86 server.

"We should increase open source contributions, promote open source innovation, cooperate with the world, promote the prosperity of RISC-V ecosystem, and promote the construction of a new pattern in the world's mainstream CPU field," he called.

The most popular CPU chip architecture in China

Risc-v architecture was founded by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. It is an open source instruction set architecture based on Reduced Instruction set (RISC) principles, which breaks the convention of x86 architecture and ArM architecture with high license fees and difficult customization.

In recent years, RISC-V architecture has risen strongly in China. According to statistics, there are hundreds of companies in China paying attention to or developing with the RISC-V instruction set. Among the 25 senior members of RISC-V International, 12 are Chinese companies.

At present, Huawei, Ali, Baidu, Tencent and other major technology manufacturers and semiconductor A-share manufacturers such as Xinyuan Shares, Le Xin Technology, Allzhi Technology, and National core Technology are all in the next competition.

At the same time, in order to avoid intellectual property disputes, the domestic RISC-V patent alliance was officially launched in August 2023. The establishment of the alliance aims to realize the safe and rapid development of enterprises in the patent alliance through the integration and protection of intellectual property rights such as cross-licensing and patent acquisition.

As Ni Guangnan previously said, open source RISC-V has become the most popular CPU chip architecture in China, driven by China's ultra-large-scale market, rich application scenarios and a large group of engineers.

The third largest architecture ecosystem

Since the creation of RISC-V architecture, more and more domestic and foreign manufacturers have begun to make efforts to layout. According to statistics, the RISC-V fund has more than 4,000 members such as Qualcomm, NVIDIA and Google.

Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International Foundation, previously said that RISC-V will ship 10 billion cores in only 12 years or so. The main inventors of RISC-V have predicted that the number of RISC-V cores worldwide will increase to 80 billion by 2025

Ni Guangnan predicted that in the field of CPU chips, Intel (x86), Arm and RISC-V will be divided into three parts in the future.

At present, in order to promote the popularization of RISC-V application, major international manufacturers are strengthening cooperation. For example, Qualcomm, NXP, Bosch, Infineon and Nordic have jointly invested in a chip company to specialize in RISC-V architecture. Qualcomm collaborated with Google to develop Snapdragon Wear chips based on RISC-V architecture; In addition, Japanese wafer fabrication plant Rapidus is also working with RISC-V chip design unicorn Tenstorrent.

With the characteristics of open source, low-cost research and development, simplification and flexibility, and design transparency, the RISC-V architecture is widely used in IoT, industry, medical, intelligent connected vehicles, general computing, communication computing and other fields.

Market research firm TrendForce has previously said that RISC-V architecture has invested in data centers in recent years, and with the investment of NVIDIA and CSPs, RISC-V is expected to become another niche market, which may focus on the open source AI market (such as Meta). Or other enterprise niche applications.

In fact, the open source RISC-V architecture has not only injected a strong impetus to technological innovation and industrial change in the world chip field, but also made an outstanding contribution to promoting the global chip industry.