Electronics

A few days ago, the media broke that Intel might acquire siFive, a RISC-V startup company, for US$2 billion. Although both Intel and siFive “do not respond” to this, too much trending information was revealed in this acquisition event, triggering various Fang pays great attention.

RISC-V skyrocketed

In fact, Qualcomm and Intel have long been investors in siFive. The reason why siFive is offering four times the premium price (siFive, the most recent round of valuation is $500 million) to buy this startup is so impatient, in addition to being stimulated by Nvidia and AMD's recent crazy spending of money to buy the company, the same Also because the development of RISC-V is too aggressive.

On the one hand, the ability demonstrated by RISC-V is no longer in the middle of the moon in the mirror. In December last year, a small electronic design company Micro Magic announced: They have designed and produced the world’s fastest 64-bit RISC-V core, 1 watt power consumption, 5GHz frequency, which is better than Apple’s M1 chip and Arm Cortex-A9 And Intel's latest and strongest E7 performance is even better. It is also said that the chip elegantly realizes David Patterson (Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who participated in the creation of RISC-V)'s original vision of a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture, and can easily work on today's battery-powered devices. It uses the word "elegance" to describe the chip's surpassing of Nvidia, arm and Intel's strongest chips.

Specifically, Micro Magic's prototype CPU can reach a clock speed of 5GHz under 1.1v voltage, which is much higher than the Intel Xeon server chip E7 running at 3.2GHz, with a CoreMarks running score of 13000 points. At the same time, the speed and energy efficiency of this RISC-V chip also exceed Exynos 4. Exynos 4 is the top component produced by Samsung Electronics for its smartphones, based on the computing core provided by Arm Holdings Plc, and is Intel's main competitor.

On the other hand, the development of the RISC-V camp is getting stronger and stronger. In the past two years, more and more manufacturers have embraced RISC-V. The official website of RISC-V shows that in 2018, there were less than 200 members of the RISC-V foundation, and now there are more than 2,000 members of the RISC-V foundation, covering In 70 countries, such a prairie fire situation took only two years.

Over the years, the world of instruction sets has been quietly changing. If the instruction set also follows the law of "Hedong in 30 years, Hexi in 30 years", then the RISC-V instruction set is the "Hexi family".

Previously, there were four mainstream instruction sets on the market, namely X86, MIPS, ARM, and RISC-V. The X86 instruction set was launched by Intel in 1978, and Intel products all adopted this instruction set architecture; MIPS was launched in 1981 Appeared, developed and authorized by MIPS Technology Company, and widely used in many electronic products, network equipment, personal entertainment devices and commercial devices; Arm is launched by Arm Company, also has a large amount of iron powder, more than 95% of the world’s intelligence Both mobile phones and tablet computers use the Arm architecture; RISC-V was born at the University of Berkeley in 2010. It is short and compact, open source, free, modular, and scalable. In 2015, the RISC-V Foundation was established and developed rapidly. The field is gradually developing towards the mobile end, PC end and server end market.

At present, MIPS has gradually faded. An important message is that Wave Computing, the parent company of MIPS, announced not long ago that it will no longer design processors based on the MIPS architecture in the future, but has begun to switch to chips based on RISC-V. MIPS rushed to RISCV and killed himself. There is a view that the current instruction set is the three pillars of X86, Arm, and RISC-V.

What is the use of accepting siFive for Intel

Founded in 2015, SiFive is the world's first semiconductor company based on RISC-V architecture. There are many RISC-based processor IP developers on the market, but SiFive has the strongest development momentum. Since 2015, the company has released a variety of RISC-V-based processor cores. In addition to continuously launching new competitive processor IPs, the company has also improved the processor-related IP layout through acquisitions and cooperation. And industrial realization. In May 2019, SiFive acquired innovation Logic to acquire all of its USB-related teams. In October 2019, through its subsidiary SemiFive and wafer factory Samsung to create a RISC-V-based chip solution, this is Samsung’s first involvement in non-arm architecture chip foundry. At the same time, SiFive also cooperates with TSMC, GF and other generations. The factory reached a cooperation to help customers customize SoC production based on its core IP.

In addition, SiFive is also committed to making it easier to program different types of computer chips. To this end, it hired the famous Silicon Valley computer scientist Lattner last year. Lattner created the programming language Swift for Apple, which has become the main way for developers to write applications for the iPhone. In addition, in order to promote the commercialization of its IP in the Chinese market, SiFive also established Saifang Technology in China to expand its IP in China.

All in all, in addition to having a strong technical force, SiFive is a company with ideals and ambitions in the RISC-V front. In August 2020, SiFive will announce a US$61 million E round of financing. This round of financing is led by sk Hynix, and Qualcomm and Intel are also investors in this round.

The reason why Intel is not reconciled to being just one of SiFive's investors still wants to have control, because the recent acquisitions of Nvidia and AMD are too fierce, and they are likely to shake Intel's position in the arena. Although Intel is still the dominant player in the PC market and data center market, there are too many variables in the future. In addition, in the early years, Intel had missed opportunities for the development of the mobile market due to strategic decision-making mistakes in the early years. It gave up a great mobile market to ARM. If you are willing and dare not to miss the opportunity of other technology routes that are rising, buying SiFive has become a must.

Intel is currently transforming into an XPU manufacturer, seeking a richer and diversified technical route, and a broader business layout has become the choice of its new CEO, and Intel is accelerating the expansion of its foundry business. If you buy siFive, you can have it A variety of semiconductor IP cores, advanced physical implementation technologies and packaging technologies help foundries to provide customers with one-stop services. It is a good business with multiple goals. In March of this year, Intel CEO Kissinger announced Intel IDM2. 0 strategy once said: "The difference between Intel's foundry business unit and other foundry services is that it not only combines Intel's process technology and advanced packaging technology, but also supports X6 core, arm and RISC-V ecosystems. IP production to deliver a world-class IP portfolio to customers."

Of course, it is also possible that SiFive will not sell and choose to continue to develop independently. After all, this market and technology are rising, and the future price will be more than 2 billion US dollars. If so, Intel may further invest. Whether it is sold or not, this round of rumors has released a lot of information. At least the development of RISC-V has reached the time for the giants to face this power.

How should China promote RISC-V

The development of open source RISC-V has reached a critical point, what should China do?

"If Intel acquires siFive, it will be a mixed blessing for China's development of RISC-V." A senior person in the industry told a reporter from China Electronics News. The good news is that more and more large companies have realized the influence of RISC-V. RISC-V has developed from a small and scattered state to a bigger and stronger one. The worrying aspect is that China may miss a good opportunity to develop the chip industry by using open source instruction sets.

The senior person further stated that once a large chip company like Intel enters RISC-V and controls the core companies in it, it will have a greater say in RISC-V, which will definitely have an impact on the RISC-V ecosystem. Most of siFive's entrepreneurial team comes from the RISC-V founding team at the University of California, Berkeley. Many RISC-V technical instructions have made important contributions to the siFive team. Although the RISC-V instruction set is open source, open and free, different companies have different implementation methods for designing chips based on these instructions. These implementation methods are patented. Each foundation member can submit its implementation methods to the fund. Yes, if the board of directors of the foundation adopts these implementations as part of the rules, then other companies will need to pay royalties if they want to adopt these implementations. Therefore, if China wants to have more contributions and voice in the RISC-V foundation, it is not only necessary to pay more money and more companies to enter the board of directors, but to have more strength and ability in technical implementation. , Prove it, contribute it, and be adopted. This is very similar to the development of 5G standards.

If the world of CPU in the future is x86, ARM and RISC-V, how should China seize the opportunity of RISC-V? This senior person believes that RISC-V should be concentrated and twisted into a rope, and it should be bigger and stronger as soon as possible. Don't disperse the strength. Each team should repeat the initial tasks, but concentrate on higher-level technologies, because siFive It has already achieved higher-level technology, and if Intel joins its power, it will grow even faster, and then we will be more tired if we catch up.