Original link: https://www.latepost.com/news/dj_detail?id=1788
“LatePost” exclusively learned that RISC-V CPU (central processing unit) start-up company Jindie Shikong has recently completed hundreds of millions of yuan in Series A financing. The financing will be mainly used for research and development of server CPUs and the introduction of talents. This round of financing was led by Lenovo Venture Capital and Legend Capital, followed by Beijing Guoguan Shunxi Fund and old shareholders. Among them, Lenovo Venture Capital is the strategic investment institution of Lenovo Group. Lenovo is currently the world’s largest PC manufacturer and the third largest server manufacturer. Both PCs and servers place heavy demands on the CPU.
Jindie Space-Time was established in 2021 and has completed 3 rounds of financing before. Investors include Jingwei Capital, Yaotu Capital, Wanwu Capital, Zhene Capital, Haikuotian Venture Capital and Quhe Capital, as well as Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Professor Gao Bingqiang, Tang Lihua, the former general manager of Quanzhi Technology, and other academic and industry veterans.
Chen Zhijian and Sun Yanbang, the two co-founders of Jindie Space-Time, have worked in the RISC-V field for many years and have experience in developing and mass-producing RISC-V chips.
Chen Zhijian joined ZTT in 2006 when he was a PhD student. In 2018, ZTT was wholly acquired by Alibaba and entered Pingtouge, a chip company under Alibaba, as a senior technical expert. He is the main person in charge of R&D and application of the domestic embedded CPU Xuantie series released by Brother Pingtou in 2019. According to Ali, the cumulative shipment of Xuantie series CPUs has exceeded 2.5 billion pieces, which are mainly used in smart speakers, driving recorders, printers, security cameras and other equipment.
Sun Yanbang joined Allwinner Technology in 2008 and served as the person in charge of Allwinner RISC-V and the general manager of Allwinner Online Co., Ltd. Allwinner’s chips are widely used in products such as set-top boxes, sweeping robots and tablet computers. During his tenure, Sun Yanbang led the team to mass-produce Allwinner’s first RISC-V CPU D1 in 2021. D1 is mainly used in products such as displays, cameras, and smart speakers.
At present, there are more than 130 people in Jindie Time and Space, and the main members are from companies such as Pingtouge and Quanzhi Technology. Advanced Time Space plans to launch its first product, the RISC-V processor core “X100”, next year. Its target scenarios are high-end intelligent robots, edge computing cards, and edge servers.
The main instruction set, the only open source one
The end of 2021, when Jindie Space-Time was established, is the end of the last round of chip investment boom. This round of upsurge began with AI chips in 2016. The initial impetus was that AI software technology changes brought new hardware requirements; , DPU (data processor) and ARM architecture CPU companies appear one after another.
From 2021 to 2022, state-owned assets and RMB funds will shift their focus to semiconductor upstream manufacturing and equipment investment under policy guidance. Coupled with a harsher external environment, chip design financing will be greatly reduced. According to business card data, from the second half of last year to the first half of this year, about 177 investment and financing transactions were completed in the chip design primary market, a year-on-year decrease of 40%.
Chen Zhijian said that there are three reasons for starting a business at this point in time: one is that he is more mature, the other is that he has found a suitable co-founder and team; Come out and grab it.
RISC-V was first designed around 2010 by the team of Professor David Patterson of the University of California, Berkeley. It is a chip instruction set that specifies the design specifications for chips and software.
At present, the mainstream instruction sets in the world are x86 and ARM. RISC-V and ARM both belong to the reduced instruction set, and x86 is a complex instruction set. The advantage of SI is that the chip can be made smaller, the manufacturing cost can be reduced, and the power consumption is lower. But its ability to handle complex calculations is relatively weak. x86-based CPUs are now mainly used in personal computers and servers in data centers, and ARM-based CPUs are mainly used in mobile devices, such as mobile phones. RISC-V chips currently mainly serve IoT devices, such as smart door locks, speakers, and cameras.
The biggest feature of RISC-V is that it is free and open source, and can be freely used for commercial purposes. Anyone can design, manufacture and sell chips based on RISC-V, without being restricted by a single country or company, and without paying IP licensing fees. However, x86 is controlled by several companies such as Intel and AMD and is not open to the outside world. ARM is controlled by the British company Arm. Chip design companies need to pay high licensing fees to Arm if they want to design chips based on ARM.
In 2015, the RISC-V Foundation was established. This new open source instruction set entered the industry from universities, and then large companies and startups began to develop chips based on RISC-V.
One of the main inventors of RISC-V, Krste Asanovic (Krste Asanovic), founded the chip design company SiFive in 2015. Jim Keller, a well-known chip engineer who participated in the design of Apple’s A-series and AMD Zen architecture, will also devote himself to RISC-V general-purpose CPU entrepreneurship in 2021 and join Tenstorrent, a Canadian AI chip startup. There are also related companies in Europe, Japan, Taiwan and other countries and regions.
Keller has repeatedly expressed his confidence in the RISC-V open source ecosystem. He believes that RISC-V is a younger architecture, without too much “garbage” added by predecessors, clean and efficient. “RSIC-V will win in the future,” he said in an interview with EE Times in June this year.
In addition to being supported by technical people such as Keller because of its openness, open source has special significance for the Chinese semiconductor industry that seeks more autonomy.
Since 2018, China’s RISC-V ecosystem has begun to accelerate development. The Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences led the establishment of the China Open Instruction Ecology (RISC-V) Alliance and the establishment of the AI chip company Zhongke Wuqi; the DAMO Academy also merged the chip research and development team with the Zhongtian Micro team to form Pingtouge, and began to develop RISC. -V chip black iron.
A group of start-up companies emerged in a concentrated manner, and companies such as Saifang (2018), Eastwell Computing (2019), and Sim Computing (2019) were born. A recent article in “LatePost” also mentioned a newly established RISC-V CPU company, Blue Core .
According to the RISC-V Foundation, by the end of 2022, the global shipment of RISC-V chips has reached 10 billion, of which about 50% are designed by Chinese companies.
How big the future space is depends on whether you can enter the higher-end market
The current technological trend of RISC-V is to develop from embedded chips with low performance, low price, and simple architecture to high-power chips with higher performance requirements and technical barriers.
This is similar to the path taken by the ARM architecture, which also belongs to the reduced instruction set. The ARM CPU developed by Qualcomm and other companies initially defeated x86 in the mobile phone market and became the mainstream. After 2018, more companies tried to use ARM to develop higher-performance products such as personal computers and server CPUs, which was originally an advantage of x86. The results of the attack have already appeared: the M1 chip that Apple Computer has used since 2020 is the ARM architecture, and Amazon also launched the ARM-based self-developed server CPU Graviton in 2018. This proves that reduced instruction sets can make high-performance chips.
After ARM’s precedent, more companies began to look for opportunities to design high-performance chips based on open source and free RISC-V. Companies such as Google, Suaneng Technology, and Ventana Micro Systems have tried to develop RISC-V server CPUs, but their actual market share is still very low. According to data from market research firm Counterpoint, in the global server CPU market in 2022, about 91% of chips will be x86 architecture, with ARM and other architectures accounting for 8% and 1% respectively.
Chen Zhijian believes that both RISC-V and ARM will move towards higher-performance markets, but the paths are slightly different: ARM’s next stop after mobile phones is personal computers, and then servers; RISC-V is the first after smart IoT devices. In the second step, it will first enter the server market in data centers, and then mobile phones and personal computers. He judged that it will take about 5 years for RISC-V to enter the server field, and it may take 10 years to enter personal computers and mobile phones. After the popularization of ARM on mobile phones, it first entered the personal computer, which is related to the close cooperation between Apple and Arm for many years. However, RISC-V first started from the Internet of Things, first as a server, and after accumulating ecology, technology and experience, it is a more feasible path to enter the mobile phone market with high ecological barriers.
More scenarios other than IoT devices will greatly expand the market space of RISC-V, because even if a large number of low-end chips are sold, its revenue, profits and R&D investment supported by profits are still unable to design mainstream high-end chips. compared to top companies.
There is no consensus on whether RISC-V can enter the higher-end chip market, or in what way and at what pace. An industry view is that RISC-V is still more suitable for relatively low-end products such as IoT chips at this stage. “To do a good job in high-power chips, the core is not whether the architecture is open source or not, but the ecology. It is difficult for a new architecture to become competitive in the short term.” A chip investor said. At the same time, some voices believe that the emergence of RISC-V entrepreneurial wave, especially the practice of using RISC-V to make high-performance chips, is mainly driven by policies, not because the market and technology are ready.
Regardless of the time and path, most RISC-V practitioners believe that this open source instruction set will eventually enter the higher-end chip market and compete with the closed instruction set.
In March of this year, David Patterson, the father of RISC-V, said at the Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Conference that RISC-V has the most opportunity to develop in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. In these scenarios, its The compound growth rate will exceed 70%.
Jim Keller said in a recent interview in August of this year: The cool thing about open source is that once people start contributing to it, it will grow. Can not go back”.
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