Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1231
More than a dozen Arm CPU startups have emerged in the Chinese market since last year. “LatePost” exclusively learned that this core technology of Arm CPU company recently completed a new round of financing of about 50 million US dollars, jointly led by Weilai Capital and Qiming Venture Capital, Yunjiu Capital, Cornerstone Capital, Zhongke Chuangxing , Harvest Capital, Bertelsmann Asia Investment Fund, Yuanhe Puhua joined the investment, and the post-investment valuation was about 300 million US dollars. This is the fourth financing of this core in the nine months since its establishment.
Most start-up companies want to enter the market from server CPUs, such as Hongjunwei, Qilingxin, Yuxianwei, etc. The first product of this chip is a computer CPU, which is the benchmark for Apple M1.
The founder of this chip, Sun Wenjian, is the former head of AMD’s customer customization department in China. He told LatePost that after Apple released the computer CPU M1 in November 2020, he believed that the time for Arm CPU was ripe.
In the past, the Arm-based CPU dominated the mobile device market such as mobile phones and tablets, while the Intel-dominated x86 architecture dominated the more profitable personal computer and server markets, with clear boundaries. But in recent years, Arm has gradually entered the dominant territory of x86. Amazon’s server chip Grivton, launched in 2018, and Apple’s later computer chip, the M1, are based on the Arm architecture.
Before this, there have been many years of trying to use Arm on servers and computers, and the participants include Qualcomm, AMD, Marvell, etc., but the results are not obvious. At the end of 2016, Qualcomm, the global mobile phone CPU leader, began to develop Arm computer chips that support Windows 10, but the Surface Pro X Arm version, which it cooperated with Microsoft, did not support some working software and did not receive good market feedback.
Sun Wenjian believes that these attempts failed because the mainstream computer operating systems such as Windows did not support Arm CPU enough at that time, and the software ecology was not perfect.
At the end of 2020, Apple launched the M1 and received good market feedback. Sun Wenjian predicted that Microsoft’s Windows operating system, which has been deeply bound to Intel’s x86 CPU for many years, will accelerate the follow-up of this change and actively support the Arm ecosystem. Microsoft and most Windows computer makers do not develop their own chips like Apple does. This is space for third-party chip suppliers. “This is an opportunity that cannot be missed. If you don’t start a business, you will regret it for the rest of your life.” Sun Wenjian said.
Nine months after Apple launched the M1, the chip was incorporated in October 2021. The founding members have experience working together and are responsible for key aspects of chip design. In addition to Sun Wenjian, Liu Fang, co-founder and CTO of this core, Shen Zhaohui, head of chip engineering, Liu Gang, head of software engineering, and Chu Ranzhou, head of system engineering, have all worked at AMD.
Liu Fang also worked for Apple and participated in the development of the M1. She joined PASemi in 2005 to develop chip cores. With Apple’s acquisition of PA Semi in 2008, Liu Fang joined Apple as a chip architect; after 2019, Liu Fang worked for AMD and Meta. During PA Semi and Apple, the leader of Liu Fang’s team was Jim Keller, a legendary figure in the field of chip design. He has led the development of Apple’s mobile phone chips A4, A5, AMD’s turn-over Zen architecture and Tesla’s self-driving chip FSD.
In the preparatory stage of the second half of last year, this chip faced two uncertain environmental factors: First, NVIDIA’s acquisition of Arm was still in progress. If the acquisition was successful, Arm, which provided IP for many chip companies, would become NVIDIA’s exclusive property rights. The degree of openness may be limited; the second is that Windows has not yet revealed its support for Arm in 2021. Sun Wenjian judges that it is not obvious enough that Microsoft is stimulated by M1 and then embraces Arm.
This year, things have been moving in the direction of startups. In February of this year, Nvidia terminated its acquisition of Arm due to opposition from most chip companies and many governments. In the same month, Microsoft announced to join the Arm-based open source organization Linaro, and Microsoft CVP Kevin Gallo said at the press conference that he would work with Linaro, Arm and Qualcomm to promote the Arm-based Windows ecosystem. At the Build developer conference in May, Microsoft further announced that it is developing native Arm 64 versions of Visual Studio 2022 and VS Code, an Arm-based development toolchain that helps developers save Arm software development time and process.
Computer manufacturers are also more actively deploying Arm CPUs. The first investor in this chip was Lenovo Ventures. Sun Wenjian told LatePost that before contacting this chip, Lenovo had been looking for a team to do Arm CPU in many ways.
The most important goal of this chip, which has been established for less than one year, is to make the first chip first, complete commercialization in 1-2 years, and then gradually expand new application scenarios and product lines. The core’s first computer CPU is currently in the engineering design stage.
Lenovo Investment will help the commercialization of this chip to a certain extent. Lenovo sold 81.9 million PCs last year, with a market share of 23.5%, ranking first in the world. An industry insider commented that this made the chip less anxious to find customers.
However, overall PC sales have declined significantly this year, with global shipments falling by 12.6% year-on-year in the second quarter of this year, the largest drop in nine years. According to this core, in addition to computer CPUs, their products will also be used in AR/MR and smart electric vehicle markets. The company’s long-term goal is to extend from terminal scenarios (computers, AR/MR, automobiles and other equipment belong to terminal scenarios). To the edge side (the computing structure between the cloud and the terminal, which can handle larger or more complex calculations nearby on the terminal side) and the cloud, forming a computing power platform that integrates the terminal, the edge and the cloud. Sun Wenjian believes that the low-power, high-performance Arm architecture will further enter more diverse computing fields.
Like all general-purpose big chip startups, this chip has to compete head-on with the giants with limited resources. The probability of success is very small, and once it is successful, the scale will be very large. Large chips such as CPU and GPU are rare opportunities in the field of hard technology that can impact the market value of 100 billion. An investor in this core once told LatePost that the bigger the opportunity, the more controversial it is; these companies are still in the early stages of product development, and “the final result will speak.”
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