from the summer of 21, the Berkeley research team spent about four years designing and developing a complete set of new instruction sets. This new instruction set is called RISC-V, which has been questioned by many parties since it was officially released in 214. By 217, the Indian government indicated that it would vigorously fund the processor project based on RISC-V, making RISC-V a de facto national instruction set in India. Then this year, China supported RISC-V from the national policy level, and Shanghai became the first city in China to list RISC-V as the object of government support. More than 15 enterprises and scientific research institutions at home and abroad, such as IBM, NXP, Western Digital, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, Google, Tesla, Huawei, Zhongtianwei, Zhongxingwei, Ali, Gaoyun and Computing Institute of Chinese Academy of Sciences, joined the RISC-V camp.
after just a few years, RISC-V not only has the support of policies, but also attracts more and more attention from enterprises and academic circles, even making Arm feel the pressure. Because since RLSC-V was born in Berkeley University in 21, one of the most frequent voices in the industry is that RISC-V may change the existing competitive structure of processor architecture dominated by Arm and Intel X86, especially in the embedded markets such as consumer products and IOT.
the difference between arm and RISC-V
both arm architecture and RISC-V architecture originated from RISC, a simplified instruction computer in 198s. The biggest difference between the two lies in their simple technical style and completely open mode. ARM is a closed instruction set architecture. Many manufacturers who only use ARM architecture can only adjust the product frequency and power consumption according to their own needs, and must not change the original design. After decades of development and evolution, the CPU architecture has become extremely complex and cumbersome. The ARM architecture documents are thousands of pages long, the number of instructions is complex, and there are many versions, which are not compatible with each other and do not support modularity, and there are high patent and architecture authorization problems. RISC-V, on the other hand, was positioned as a completely open source architecture at the beginning of its design, avoiding the detours in the development of computer system for decades. The architecture document is only over 2 pages, and the number of basic instructions is only over 4. At the same time, a set of instruction sets supports all architectures, and modularity allows users to customize freely and configure different instruction subsets according to their needs.
where will the competition between ARM and RISC-V go in the future?
at present, ARM occupies most of the market of processor IP represented by mobile devices, and RISC-V is a rising star. So, where will the future go?
the competition between ARM and RISC-V is a bit like the battle between Windows and Linux at the end of last century, and the future competition pattern between arm and RISC-V may be similar. First of all, it is almost certain that RISC-V has no chance in the traditional advantage field of ARM, that is, the mobile phone field, because the mobile phone will not completely change the processor core after ten years of iteration, which is the same as Windows is still the leading operating system in the PC market after more than 2 years of wind and rain. However, in the emerging fields, RISC-V and ARM are both at the same starting line, and RISC-V is likely to beat ARM with the characteristics of open source instruction set, or at least occupy a considerable market share. At present, such emerging markets are mainly the Internet of Things market. The Internet of Things market has the characteristics of long tail, many market segments and high requirements for power consumption. Therefore, it has advantages for RISC-V which can flexibly modify the instruction set and chip architecture design for different applications. In contrast, using ARM can only make a standardized design, and it is difficult to achieve differentiation. In addition, the Internet of Things market is sensitive to cost, and the free license of RISC-V is also very important for chip manufacturers. In the list of RISC-V foundations, we can see companies such as Qualcomm and MediaTek that focus on the Internet of Things. However, in the current hot AI chip market, ARM and RISC-V do not see obvious advantages and disadvantages. This is because both ARM and RISC-V cores in high-performance AI chips are mainly used as controllers, and the most important and core computing units are often designed by circuit designers themselves without using IP. On the other hand, the profit margin of AI chips is often large, so the free feature of RISC-V does not bring particularly great advantages.