Author｜ Bao Yonggang
Editor｜ Wang Chuan
The future sometimes runs faster than people think.
As Liu Cixin wrote in “The Three-Body Problem”, human beings are a race that is subject to a “technological explosion”.
The wheel of the times is rolling forward, constantly reshaping people’s cognition of technology. Even those who ignite a spark of fire can hardly imagine the wildfires raging in the future.
Mokley and Eckert, who invented the world’s first general-purpose computer in 1946, could not have predicted that the computing power that was once obtained with a 170-square-kilometer, 30-ton giant can now be easily obtained through cloud computing. .
John McCarthy, who proposed the concept of artificial intelligence in 1961, can hardly imagine the scene where AI assistants are now active at people’s fingertips.
Martin Cooper, who invented the mobile phone in the 1990s, could not have imagined that the mobile communication tool he developed would one day almost evolve into a human “external organ”, immersing in all aspects of life.
Behind these surprises, there is a rationale: the evolution of the underlying processor.
At the end of the 20th century, Arm CPU’s entry into the PC market was not smooth, but after turning to the mobile CPU market and changing the business model, it finally became clear, and the prosperity of the mobile Internet was achieved.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the x86 CPU, which was booming in the PC processor market, unexpectedly entered the server market with its cost-effective advantage and promoted the development of cloud computing.
In 2010, the emerging instruction set RISC-V was born at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2014, the first group of people who came into contact with RISC-V in China were attracted by the open source features of RISC-V, but no one knew how RISC-V would develop in the future.
When Ali Pingtou’s team came into contact with RISC-V in 2014, they were also skeptical about the prospect of commercialization of this emerging instruction set. Brother Pingtou, who recognized the concept of open source, later verified the technical capabilities of RISC-V and proved the high performance of RISC-V.
In the golden autumn of 2022, Brother Pingtou rushed into the blue ocean of RISC-V high-efficiency CPU with Xuantie C908, and went to explore the edge AI market.
This is a key battle for Brother Pingtou, and it will also be an important milestone on the way forward for RISC-V.
The “accidents” that RISC-V will bring to the technology industry are hidden in the development of RISC-V in recent years.
High-efficiency blue ocean, RISC-V comes up with two major killers
In 2014, RISC-V was only active in the circle of a few technology enthusiasts. ” In 2014, we were also a little unsure about whether to fully invest in RISC-V. ” said Meng Jianyi, vice president of Pingtouge, “mainly worried about whether the instruction set capability from academia is sufficient, and it is unclear whether its functional advantages lie in where.”
This is actually the concern of most people who hold a wait-and-see attitude towards RISC-V, but under the appeal of the concept of open source, further research in academia, coupled with the joint efforts of technical geeks, etc., RISC-V in 2016 Introduced into China, it began to attract attention.
In 2018, Brother Pingtou, who had been exposed to RISC-V early, also took the lead in developing the first RISC-V CPU – Xuantie E902, which is a CPU with low performance and low power consumption. This is actually a product of Brother Pingtou testing RISC-V. After verifying the low power consumption of RISC-V, Brother Pingtou launched a Xuantie C910 with a main frequency of 2.5GHz a year later, using RISC -V’s ability to make high-performance products is also verified.
After gaining enough confidence in RISC-V, in 2020, Pingtou launched the more cost-effective Xuantie C906, which is also the world’s first commercial CPU with a frequency of over 1GHz. A year later, Pingtou launched the Xuantie E907 with improved performance.
The market has been expecting Arm Cortex A55-level energy-efficient RISC-V products to be absent.
The Cortex A55 is a product launched by Arm as early as 2017. Until 2022, many products including home appliance SoCs and automotive MCUs still use the Cortex A55 core. This is enough to show the market’s demand for high-efficiency CPUs, so at the 2022 Yunqi Conference, Brother Pingtou released the latest generation of high-efficiency CPUs, the Xuantie C908.
Since it is a late product, if it wants to be successful in the market, it must have features that are more attractive to users.
“Xuantie C908 is the most energy-efficient product in Xuantie’s family.” Meng Jianyi introduced that Brother Pingtou promotes technological innovation in terms of the entire CPU architecture and AI energy efficiency.
While having higher performance than the Arm A55 of the same level, the higher energy efficiency of the Xuantie C908 and the native support for AI are its two major killers in the energy-efficient blue ocean market.
The data shows that the main frequency performance of Xuantie C908 is up to 2.0GHz, which is 40% higher than that of Xuantie C906, and the energy efficiency ratio is improved by 24%.
“RISC-V itself has the advantage of being streamlined. To further achieve high energy efficiency under a streamlined architecture, what we can do is to design the entire hardware circuit as simplified and ingenious as possible to achieve a more extreme energy efficiency ratio.” Meng Jianyi Say.
To achieve high-performance and energy-efficient CPU is a big challenge. In order to improve energy efficiency, Pingtou has made various innovations. On the one hand, he chose a 9-stage dual-issue pipeline; on the other hand, he adopted the instruction fusion technology, which is to put Two instructions become one execution; also, energy efficiency is achieved through optimization of memory bandwidth.
Native support for AI, as the trump card of Xuantie C908 to achieve differentiation, also needs to consider energy efficiency. Based on the standard Vector architecture, Pingtou has made an extended design to support the new Int4 data format, so that the Xuantie C908 can take into account high energy efficiency while supporting AI natively.
For customers using C908, if the computing power demand for AI is less than 1TOPS, a separate NPU is no longer required. For customers, this not only saves the trouble of choosing among dozens of NPUs on the market, but also reduces the difficulty of development.
Don’t underestimate the AI computing power of 1TOPS. This computing power is enough to meet the intelligent needs of most of the current smart cameras, and it can also develop the recently popular AI scanning pen.
“An emerging architecture must find emerging markets and emerging applications. Because it is easier to form a demonstration of large-scale applications from the links with the most development space for market products, it is easier to form a demonstration of large-scale applications. ” Meng Jianyi said.
The products that use battery power and have a demand for AI are exactly the blue ocean that is suitable for the first breakthrough of RISC-V high-efficiency CPU. The demand for intelligence in this field is becoming more and more popular, but the challenge in this field is still ecology.
In addition to differentiated technologies, Pingtou Ge will also provide a complete set of solutions, which is also different from Arm’s approach, which makes user development easier and allows more freedom of choice.
Nuggets edge AI four gold mines, ecology is the strongest tool
Xuantie C908 has very clear application scenarios – intelligent interaction, multimedia terminal, AR/VR, wireless communication, etc. ” Xuantie C908 should be the product with the largest volume among our mid-to-high-end products. ” Meng Jianyi judged.
The urgency of market demand for products can be seen from the speed of commercialization. Leifeng.com learned that Xuantie C908 has had several early users, one of which is Canaan Technology, which has also been working in the RISC-V field for many years. Canaan Technology is developing a mid-to-high-end three-dimensional visual AI chip based on Xuantie C908.
If you want to bring products to a wider market, you need ecological prosperity. The relationship between the chip and the upper-level ecology is like the relationship between the root and the trunk and branches of a tree. Only when the chip has sufficient capabilities can the upper-level software ecology prosper.
To measure a processor, not only depends on the hardware, but also the ability of the basic software is indispensable. This has been the consensus of the industry.
“We provide complete development tools and continue to invest. This year, our most important progress is the support of a wealth of third-party commercial tools. There are also more and more open source tools supporting our processors.” Meng Jianyi According to the introduction, “We have cooperated with some very influential companies in the ecosystem, and the support of third-party commercial and open source tools will become the characteristics of our processors.”
At the same time, the advantage of commercial and open source tool chains is that it is easier to solve problems encountered in the development process.
For example, in the RISC-V ecosystem, the debugging problem has not been done very well. Brother Pingtou already has a better solution. Brother Pingtou provides HHB compilation tools, which can not only make good use of the AI capabilities of the Xuantie CPU, but also support third-party AI IPs.
On a higher level, the cross-platform video vision application framework TMedia launched by Pingtou Ge has the characteristics of high elasticity, high energy efficiency and high scalability, which can better support customers to develop applications.
Only the software tools at the bottom of the chip are still not enough, and mainstream operating systems need to be supported. In the low-power MCU market, the application of RISC-V does not depend on the software ecosystem, which is the key reason why RISC-V can ship 10 billion chips even without a mature ecosystem.
To make money in the energy-efficient edge computing market, the software ecosystem cannot be avoided. This year, a major development of the entire RISC-V is that Google Android natively supports RISC-V processors. Andriod has a very large and rich mobile ecosystem. Andriod natively supports RISC-V and adds new features to the application of RISC-V in the mobile market. Space.
“This is iconic. Google Android’s acceptance of RISC-V is like RISC-V has officially entered the Andriod ecological arena. Before, it was more like a warm-up outside the field.” Meng Jianyi said.
In fact, Andriod supports RISC-V, and Pingtou played a key role.
In addition to the mobile ecosystem, RISC-V has also moved towards the higher-performance PC market. At the Yunqi Conference in 2022, Brother Pingtou also announced the completion of the first adaptation of RISC-V and the community version of the Tongxin operating system, successfully running the desktop environment and a variety of office and development software.
More than that, not long ago, based on the high-performance SoC prototype “Yingying 1520”, Pingtou Ge completed the adaptation of the dragon lizard operating system, which is the world’s first RISC-V architecture compatible cloud operating system.
From the terminal to the PC to the cloud, Pingtou has completed the in-depth adaptation of RISC-V with RTOS, Yocto Linux, Android, Dragon Lizard, Tongxin deepin and other international mainstream and domestic operating systems.
This also means that Brother Pingtou has removed the obstacles for RISC-V developers to develop software system adaptation from the terminal to the cloud. Although there is still a lot of work to be done, at least the first step has been pioneered. , which provides a good foundation for the prosperity of the RISC-V ecosystem and the enrichment of applications.
“Whether in general computing or resource-constrained computing, the ecology of RISC-V has established a certain foundation.” He Xiaoqing, director of the China Software Industry Association and chairman of the Embedded System Branch, believes.
Meng Jianyi believes that when 100 billion RISC-V chips are shipped, the RISC-V ecosystem should have been basically established at that time, which can also prove the tenacious vitality of the RISC-V architecture.
The hardware is gradually complete, and the software ecosystem is developing rapidly. The key to how RISC-V can bring surprising applications is to grasp the direction of RISC-V development.
RISC-V also needs to do 5G mode
Ni Guangnan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said at the 2022 Yunqi Conference: “The open source model has moved from the software field to the hardware field, and RISC-V provides an opportunity for my country to take the initiative in the development of the chip industry. China must play its due role in the global open source field. In order to break the technological monopoly and promote the world’s collaborative innovation, we will contribute Chinese wisdom, Chinese solutions and Chinese strength.”
Obviously, the core of RISC-V is open source. To stabilize the architecture of RISC-V, different companies need to explore from different angles, otherwise the architecture will have no vitality. At this time, more institutions or companies that can contribute will play a more important role in the future development of RISC-V.
This is also an opportunity for Chinese companies. Bao Yungang, a researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, believes that in the past 20 years, there have been two main modes of CPU development in China. One is the high-speed rail mode of “introduction-digestion-absorption-re-innovation”; the other is to build technology independently system, the Beidou model for independently building an industrial ecology.
” In recent years, a third model, the 5G model, has emerged. More and more domestic companies have spontaneously chosen the open instruction set RISC-V to participate in the global ecological construction of RISC-V. International advantages.” Bao Yungang said.
In the 5G mode of the CPU, it is even more necessary for Chinese companies to actively participate in the formulation of the RISC-V standard and contribute more to the RISC-V community.
“Under the constraints of concept, company size, talents and other conditions, domestic RISC-V companies have relatively less investment or contribution to the open source community than many foreign companies.” Many people in the RISC-V industry expressed their opinions on Lei Fengwang said.
“Our software team has slowly walked a path and will make a certain contribution to the software. We will gradually have such a system, which requires a lot of investment. We also call on domestic companies to increase their efforts in Investment in the RISC-V field. ” Meng Jianyi said.
It is reported that Brother Pingtou is a member of the board of directors of the RISC-V International Foundation, leading 11 technical directions in the foundation, including data center, storage management, Android, and security.
Just as x86 and Arm have encountered accidents in the course of their development, no one can know what surprises RISC-V can bring to the world, but only with greater contributions to standard formulation and ecological development, will there be more Opportunity to make history.
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