How hot is RISC-V?

According to the official data of RISC-V International (RISC-V International Association), the shipments of this architecture chip exceeded 10 billion in 2022, most of which came from China. Huawei, ZTE, China Mobile, Alibaba and other parties are in the layout.

Krste Asanovic, the principal inventor of the RISC-V instruction set architecture and co-founder and chief architect of SiFive, also predicted some time ago that the number of RISC-V cores will increase to 80 billion by 2025.

At the 2023 RISC-V China Summit in August this year, Academician Ni Guangnan also served as its platform. On behalf of Saifang Technology, the company summarized and shared the industry’s prospects for the future development of RISC-V, that is, entering the car cabin in 26 years, commercial core in 28 years to compete with another architecture, mobile phone SoC in 29 years, and Arm and X86 to achieve three parts of the world in 30 years.

It is worth mentioning that during the summit, Deepin Digital Intelligence delivered the first RISC-V laptop ROMA to RISC-V International Association (the main chip uses the Saifang Technology JH-7110 processor), which is a milestone event for RISC-V to expand to more fields.

At present, RISC-V has a firm foothold in the field of Internet of Things, the next question is: in the scenario with higher performance requirements and more complex ecological requirements, the wide application of RISC-V application processors, where the first shot is fired?

The answer given by Saifang Technology on behalf of the enterprise is: industry.

Not in the chip circle, many people may not understand Saifang Technology (StarFive). Founded in 2018, the company is focused on creating value for customers with RISC-V innovation. Since its establishment, it has successively delivered a number of self-developed RISC-V CPU IP products – Fang · Tiansu (Dubhe), as well as the first mass-produced RISC-V application processor – Fang · Jihong-7110 (JH-7110), which has good technical strength and product delivery ability in the RISC-V field.

As a representative enterprise of RISC-V, why does Saifang first aim at industry? What is the status of RISC-V products in the industrial sector? What are the prospects? Compared to X86 and Arm, what is RISC-V’s strength?

With the above questions, recently, Wisdom power · Internet of Things think tank exclusive interview with Zhou Jie, senior sales director of Saifang Technology, to get detailed answers.

X86 still accounts for most of the domestic industrial field

In short, RISC-V is a class of chip architecture that corresponds to X86 and the Arm architecture that the namesake company just launched. Among them, X86 is deeply rooted in the traditional industry represented by the Wintel system, and relative to the Arm architecture, it occupies 95% of the chips of mobile devices. Unlike the two, RISC-V adopts the open source model, which greatly reduces the threshold of chip development, and RISC-V’s modular and scalable design gives participants great freedom of innovation, so RISC-V has been favored around the world.

At present, in the domestic industrial field chips, X86 accounts for more than 50%, which corresponds to the majority of the industrial operating system is Windows, which is the result of the early Wintel system bundle. In industrial tablets and display and control integrated devices, Arm is also gradually penetrating.

Because of the large demand for chips in various industrial scenarios, and the chip process and performance requirements in industrial scenarios are not high in consumer grade, this field naturally becomes the first choice for RISC-V chip landing.

Nowadays, RISC-V chip matching systems are mainly based on various distributions of Linux, such as Debian, Ubuntu, KylinOS, OpenEular, etc. Android is also in the process of being supported by Google.

As the first industrial test product, SaiFANG mass-produced RISC-V application processors-JH-7110 at the end of 2022. The 28nm process is equipped with 64-bit quad-core RISC-V CPU, and the stable operating frequency reaches 1.5GHz, with good performance in performance, power consumption, function and other aspects.