After watching, testing the water, and stepping on the pit, RISC-V stood on the springboard to enter the golden age

“ When an open, underlying technical architecture achieves consensus, it will become an irreversible trend. “

Author | Bao Yonggang

Editor | Wang Chuan

“Does choosing open source mean that we give up completely self-research? Should we choose the RISC-V technical route?”

In an internal meeting held by Ali Pingtou in 2018, more than a dozen people in charge had a heated discussion, with supporters and opponents expressing their views.

After many discussions, more than a dozen high-level executives finally raised their hands and agreed with Brother Pingtou to choose the technical route of RISC-V.

The decision was not easy.

In this year, RISC-V is still just a “toy” for geeks in the eyes of many people, and most people still can’t see the bright future of RISC-V.

Meng Jianyi, vice president of Pingtouge Semiconductor, who witnessed the meeting, recalled that the dozen or so people in charge who raised their hands through this “adventure” had already seen a very important point at that time: regard RISC-V as a standard, and still You can develop your own technology on top of it.

The good news is that this seed five years ago finally bears fruit that symbolizes a staged victory at the first Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Conference in the spring of 2023.

This staged victory is not only the improvement of technology and product performance, but also people and companies who love open source technology are walking in the same direction, and a group of semiconductor peers have shifted from the Arm camp to the RISC-V camp.

Pingtouge RISC-V has been racing for 5 years, leading the rapid development of China’s RISC-V ecology, and also promoting the development of global RISC-V.

As Ni Guangnan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said at the Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Conference, “Today RISC-V is the most popular architecture in China’s CPU field and has become a new engine to promote the development of a new generation of information technology.”

But Rome was not built in a day. Now China’s RISC-V ecology has begun to take shape, and Brother Pingtou’s achievements in the RISC-V field have to start from 2015.

01

Fierce debate on whether to choose RISC-V

2015 was the beginning of the core-making trend of Internet companies. In this year, Ali began to cooperate with Zhongtian Micro, which was the only domestic company with its own embedded CPU IP core at that time, to develop cloud chip architecture.

In 2015, it was also the time when Chinese open source enthusiasts discovered the treasure of RISC-V. Meng Jianyi had already heard about RISC-V at this time, and it was his first close contact a year later.

“The first summit of RISC-V in China in 2016 was held in Shanghai. When I participated in the meeting, I felt that RISC-V had a strong vitality. Because of a new structure, it could attract five or six hundred people to participate . There are already a lot of people for a chip architecture.” Meng Jianyi said.

At that time, Meng Jianyi was already a chip veteran with more than ten years of CPU experience. He was impressed by the first RISC-V summit in China, but he contributed to RISC-V in 2018.

In 2018, Ali, which has been deeply involved in the chip field, acquired Zhongtian Micro, where Meng Jianyi works. In September of the same year, the chip research and development team of DAMO Institute and Zhongtian Micro team merged to form Pingtouge, and the new team continued Alibaba’s inclusive mission.

Brother Pingtou develops large chips for Alibaba Cloud data centers, such as Hanguang 800 and Yitian 710, which provide inclusive computing power in the cloud, which is the focus of many people’s attention. But what is easy to be overlooked is Pingtouge’s forward-looking layout of RISC-V, the efforts and achievements made on edge AIoT Pratt & Whitney computing power.

In 2018, RISC-V had just begun to enter the public group from the technology enthusiast group in China, and most people looked at RISC-V as if they were looking at flowers in a fog. At this time, for a company, to choose an emerging instruction set, the opportunity is as great as the challenge.

But for the Pingtouge team, another key issue is self-positioning. The C-Sky system developed by Zhongtian Micro has been cultivated for many years and has been recognized by customers. Will choosing RISC-V make this image fade? Many executives once voted against it.

“I was also very conflicted at first, and I didn’t figure out what kind of attitude I should take to make new products.” Meng Jianyi said.

After many heated discussions, everyone reached a consensus on the same basis: RISC-V instruction set is a standard , just like the USB standard and 5G standard, and will not lose its technical advantages because of the openness and unification of the standard.

Meng Jianyi said, “We also see that the lower the technology is, the more it needs to be done in an open source way .”

Although the technical direction has been set, Pingtouge’s team still has no idea about the capabilities of RISC-V, so they want to verify the capabilities of RISC-V as soon as possible.

02

Experience wait and see, test the water, step on the pit,

RISC-V becomes the first choice

Thanks to Zhongtian Micro’s technology accumulation in the CPU field, Pingtouge’s team only spent three months in 2018 designing a lightweight processor Xuantie 902 based on the RISC-V instruction set. This product proves that RISC-V can make products that meet very limited cost scenarios, taking into account performance and extremely low power consumption requirements.

In order to explore the high-performance boundary of RISC-V, Pingtou developed the Xuantie 910 one year later. This product breaks the RISC-V performance ceiling and makes high-performance chips based on the RISC-V architecture possible, but this is not enough.

Meng Jianyi observed that the market is rich, and it is difficult to meet the needs of all customers with just one product. In the following five years, Pingtouge successively launched Xuantie RISC-V series processors, and now has 8 RISC-V processor product families ranging from low power consumption, low cost to high performance, high energy efficiency C, E, and R series , Widely used in more than 30 fields and application scenarios such as edge computing, wireless communication, industrial control, and general-purpose MCU.

During this process, Brother Pingtou has attracted many companies to join the RISC-V ecosystem , including Canaan Technology, which also uses RISC-V to design chips, and Yunzhisheng, which started from Arm and turned to RISC-V, and also designed with Xuantie 910. The computing power of cloud CPUs, behind the cooperation between every company and Brother Pingtou, is the epitome of RISC-V ecological development.

Canaan Technology used RISC-V to design AI chips two years earlier than Pingtouge. “Our team has more geeks, and we think RISC-V is more promising, so we decided on it.” Founder, Chairman and CEO of Canaan Technology Official Zhang Nangeng said that they did not hesitate to choose RISC-V.

Canaan Technology took a fancy to the advantages of RISC-V’s customization and the ability to save a lot of RISC-V IP licensing fees, but they soon discovered the problem of being the first to use RISC-V to design chips.

” Although the use of RISC-V saves a lot of IP authorization fees at the beginning, there are many pitfalls , and relatively large bugs are okay. Sometimes when the chip has been taped out, random errors can only be solved with the compiler, or even Some features need to be cut off. Of course, this is unavoidable for any complex chip or system.” Zhang Nangeng told Leifeng.com more than two years ago.

Tang Weiwei, vice president of Canaan Technology, suggested to the team, “We should still find a relatively mature RISC-V product with a product and ecology. This can save a lot of team investment.”

Therefore, Canaan Technology, which started RISC-V earlier than Brother Pingtou, also chose to cooperate with Brother Pingtou to develop products using Xuantie IP. At the Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Conference, Canaan Technology launched the world’s first RISC-V V Vector1.0 standard commercial mass-produced chip K230, Pingtouge and Canaan Technology jointly push the boundaries of RISC-V expansion.

“We still encounter problems in the process of cooperating with Pingtouge, but Pingtouge’s technology and support are relatively strong. When encountering problems, we will troubleshoot and deal with them within a few days.” Tang Weiwei is satisfied with Pingtouge’s products and services.

Similarly, I believed in the computing power of open source power at the beginning, and I am breaking through the boundaries of RISC-V products and ecology together with Pingtouge.

“When I worked on Linux in the early days of my career, I had a very deep impression. When an open, low-level technical architecture achieves a consensus, it will become an irreversible trend .” Said Wang Lei, senior vice president of Computing Energy, ” Our original intention of choosing RISC-V is that it has room for customization and further optimization. With the idea of ​​choosing RISC-V, we also investigated the options of RISC-V IP in the market at that time, from product maturity, technology, competition After a multi-dimensional evaluation, I finally chose Brother Pingtou. To this day, I still think that the choice made two years ago is our best choice.”

Even though Brother Pingtou is leading the industry in all dimensions, the fact that the entire RISC-V ecosystem is still immature cannot be avoided. The two parties have adopted a small-step exploration strategy.

“Initially, we only dared to use RISC-V on low-end devices, worrying that customers would have concerns about the RISC-V ecosystem and product maturity. Now it seems that the development of the RISC-V ecosystem has far exceeded my expectations .” Wang Lei said, “We have launched a 64-core RISC-V server chip, and our cooperation with Brother Pingtou has moved from mass production of embedded chips to comprehensive exploration of cloud chips.”

Unlike those unhesitating open source believers, Yunzhisheng, who initially used the Arm architecture, hesitated before embracing RISC-V.

“In 2018, we made a chip based on the Arm architecture. In the second half of 2019, the original idea of ​​designing the chip with Pingtou RISC-V IP was to save money. This attempt made us find that RISC-V is not bad.” Cloud Li Xiaohan, co-founder of Zhisheng Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., said, “Initially we also took a wait-and-see attitude towards RISC-V, and didn’t want to add uncertainty to ourselves in choosing the chip technology route, but with the development of RISC-V products and ecology , we finally chose to cooperate with Brother Pingtou.”

Looking back on this history, Li Xiaohan believes that there are two main reasons for choosing RISC-V. On the one hand, more and more partners are found to use RISC-V and Pingtouge’s IP, and on the other hand, the algorithm is compatible and compatible. The compatibility and continuity of the IP are particularly good, so that after we optimize the algorithm to the extreme on one chip, the workload on the second chip will be much less.

This is how Yunzhisheng was attracted by the cost savings of RISC-V, and finally found that RISC-V product power and ecology are more attractive.

It is the support of these companies and developers that has led to the rapid development of RISC-V in the past five years. In this process, the Pingtou Gexuantie processor has also become the processor product series with the largest influence and market share in the domestic RISC-V field .

“In many cases, the production of chips is only the first step in the long march.” This is what Meng Jianyi often said. With so many years of experience in the chip industry, he knows the importance of ecological construction.

03

From simple love to commercialization,

From ecological construction 1.0 to 2.0

“The 1.0 stage of ecological construction is a technological innovation around a single software and hardware technology stack such as CPU, chips, development tools, basic software, and applications. Pingtouge has continuously expanded the boundaries of RISC-V technology, performance, and applications through five years. An ecosystem with Xuantie RISC-V as the core has been formed.” Meng Jianyi further said.

“Now, the Xuantie RISC-V ecology has entered the stage of ecological construction 2.0, which is deeply integrated with major ecological systems . This is mainly reflected in: on the one hand, the RISC-V ecology is gradually making great strides in the direction of standardization and scale; on the other hand, , The barriers between the processor ecology and the operating system ecology are broken, and the cooperation is closer and deeper. We believe that this will greatly stimulate the potential of the RISC-V ecology.”

But the hardship of breaking the barrier between the processor ecology and the operating system can only be remembered by those who have experienced it.

Lars Bergstorm, engineering director of Google’s Android project, said that the first work he has seen to make the Android system run on RISC-V hardware came from Brother Pingtou, and the contribution from the Asia-Pacific region really promoted the development of open source projects.

In fact, Brother Pingtou made a breakthrough in RISC-V compatible Android from zero to one, because after designing the Xuantie 910, he proposed an idea in order to be able to use the Xuantie 910.

When Li Chunqiang, a senior technical expert of Pingtouge, proposed to make RISC-V compatible with Android in 2020, there were objections in the team at first. After all, Pingtouge is a commercial company. To be compatible with a huge Android system, the first thing to do is to face the challenge of workload. , Secondly, it is difficult to see the effect of resource investment in the short term.

After many internal discussions, from the perspective of the entire ecological development of RISC-V, Brother Pingtou finally decided to invest some resources to take the lead in doing Android-compatible work in the industry.

This is why the Android system runs smoothly on the Xuantie 910 processor for the first time in early 2021, and in 2022, Google officially supports the RISC-V architecture for the first time.

In the process of adapting to Android, Brother Pingtou has modified more than 120,000 lines of code. Behind such a huge code modification is the effort of engineers.

What Li Chunqiang still remembers is that a young and handsome engineer in Pingtouge’s team who is doing Android adaptation has lost a lot of weight in order to complete the Android adaptation work as soon as possible. But when the Android system successfully ran on the Xuantie 910, the slightly haggard engineer had a bright eye and a hearty laugh.

It is because of Brother Pingtou’s persistence and breakthroughs from zero to one in the RISC-V field that he can see at the Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Conference that Brother Pingtou has basically completed the integration of international and domestic mainstream operating systems with RISC-V. V is fully compatible , including Android, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Dragon Lizard, openKylin, Tongxin, Skyworth Coocaa, RTT and other operating systems.

This means that RISC-V is fully capable of undertaking software applications through different operating systems such as cloud, desktop, and terminal, and upper-layer application developers can smoothly achieve architecture compatibility with zero code.

Brother Pingtou also announced the ecological plan at the Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Summit. For the 150,000 developers in the chip open community, Pingtouge launched the online learning platform “RISC-V Academy Program” for the first time, encouraging participation in global RVFA certification. For industry partners, Pingtouge launched the “Xuantie Preferred Chip” plan to promote the implementation of ecological chips; at the same time, set up “Xuantie Preferred Partners”, the first batch of which was awarded to Allwinner Technology, Aiput, Suaneng, Boliu Smart, Qingwei 8 companies, including Smart, Unisound, Craftsman, and AFP IoT, affirmed their outstanding contributions to the RISC-V ecosystem.

Meng Jianyi always believes that Chinese companies should do more work in the RISC-V International Foundation and play a key role in promoting the construction of RISC-V international standards.

Calista Redmond, CEO of the RISC-V International Foundation, introduced at the meeting that 12 of the 22 senior members of the foundation are from China . In the construction of international standards, Brother Pingtou led 11 of the main technical groups and promoted the formulation of standards in 29 technical directions. He is recognized as the Chinese institution with the largest input.

At the largest RISC-V conference in China, Meng Jianyi recalled the first time he participated in the RISC-V summit in Shanghai in 2016. “That was more of an academic conference, and there were many students and scholars involved. Everyone thought it might be a ‘fashionable’ technology.”

“Seven years have passed, and the people who participated in our Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Summit have changed. Today, many of the participants are from enterprises. RISC-V has changed from a simple love to a commercializable technology. and products .” This is Meng Jianyi’s biggest feeling.

From the introduction of 10 billion processors, it took decades for the Intel x86 architecture, 17 years for Arm, and only about 10 years for RISC-V, which is unprecedented in the history of chip architecture development. In 2022, 10 billion processors using the RISC-V architecture have been shipped, and some data predict that the number will exceed 80 billion by 2025.

It can be seen that RISC-V has already stood on the springboard of the golden age.

The text and pictures in this article are from Leifeng.com