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Alibaba, Huawei, ZTE Started Thinking Outside Silicon Box And Begun Investigating RISC-V As Means To Distance Themselves From U.S. Chipmakers.

By Tobias Mann

U.S. trade restrictions and growing pressure from the Chinese Communist Party to end reliance on foreign chipmakers has left many Chinese technology companies understandably worried.

Over the past few months, the U.S. Commerce Department has cut off Chinese companies believed to have military ties from critical intellectual property and manufacturing equipment used to make high-end chips. Meanwhile, the agency has taken steps to prevent many of these same companies from sourcing prefabricated silicon from U.S. chipmakers like Intel.

Faced with this tech decoupling, Chinese companies like Alibaba, Huawei, And ZTE Have Started Thinking Outside The Silicon Box And Have Begun Investigating RISC-V As A Means To Distance Themselves From U.S. Chipmakers.

What Is RISC-V and Why Does It Matter?

You’d be forgiven if you’d never heard of RISC-V. The architecture has only been around for a little over a decade, and it’s only now reaching commercial viability. “RISC-V is an open hardware, open source hardware instruction set architecture,” RISC-V CTO Mark Himelstein said.

As its name suggests, RISC-V is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture not dissimilar to Arm, Power, or Sun SPARC. But unlike previous RISC processors, RISC-V is entirely open source and freely available to anyone. It’s also downright tiny, with just 47 instructions. By comparison, Arm has more than 200 instructions, while complex instruction set computer (CISC) architectures, used by AMD and Intel, can have well in excess of 1,500 instructions.

Instructions are the most basic calculations these chips can do. One instruction might be to add, while another might be to subtract or to multiply. The idea behind RISC-V is to keep the instruction set as small as possible so that implementors can add the instructions that matter to them, using extensions.

Extensions can be used to enable more advanced mathematics such as matrix or scaler calculations, which are necessary in more sophisticated use cases. This means RISC-V can be scaled back to behave more like an ASIC or FPGA, or eventually, it can be scaled up to compete with Arm or x86-based systems.

This ability to tailor the instruction set to a specific use case is one of the reasons RISC-V-based chips are so power efficient, at least in an embedded environment. “The biggest rocket science about RISC-V, in my opinion, is the flexibility that it has, the extensibility that it has. It’s designed to last 50 years,” Himelstein said. “This extension model, and how we put it together, is just incredibly brilliant.”

Filling the Void

At this stage, most RISC-V development is aimed at embedded controllers, IoT, and 5G applications where power is a major factor. However, the open source nature of the architecture means it is largely immune from trade restrictions leveled against Chinese tech firms.

“The impact of U.S. trade restrictions toward China’s advanced semiconductor manufacturing is critical, spanning almost all areas such as materials, equipment, and [electronic design automation] software,” Charlie Kun Dai, principal consulting analyst at Forrester, said. “China is making a strategic investment to accelerate local innovation, but it’s a long march.”

Alibaba, Huawei, and ZTE are just three of more than two dozen Chinese companies that have joined RISC-V International as members. As trade tensions have made it more difficult for Chinese technology companies to use x86-based and even Arm-based chips, the need for an open source alternative has become more pronounced, explained Glenn O’Donnell, VP and research director of infrastructure and operations at Forrester Research.

“When you get backed into a corner, you have to do something,” he said. “Developing a whole new architecture is next to impossible. I won’t say it’s impossible, but I just can’t imagine a company taking that on, even a company like Huawei.”

Alibaba’s RISC-Y Bet

So rather than reinvent the wheel, companies like Alibaba have started building chips based on the RISC-V architecture. T-Head, a division of the public cloud provider, is among the first to bring a high-end RISC-V chip to market.

“RISC-V is very attractive as an alternative to closed and costly [instruction set architectures],” Yu Pu, edge product lead for T-Head, said at the Hot Chips 2020 event. “The open and free RISC-V ISA accelerates processor innovation through open standard collaboration. The scalability, extensibility, and modularity enable processor customization and optimization for domain-specific workloads.”

According to Pu, this makes RISC-V ideal for workloads like machine learning accelerators, network processing, security enclaves, and storage controllers. The XT910 Xuantie processor — named for a heavy dark iron sword in Chinese tales and announced last August — is a 16-core RISC-V-based chip, operating at between 2 GHz and 2.5 GHz. The chip is based on a 12-nanometer manufacturing process.

The chip itself is being aimed for use at the cloud edge and in IoT applications. According to T-Head, the XT910 is roughly equivalent to a three-year-old smartphone processor based on an Arm Cortex-A73 core architecture.

For the moment, these chips are mainly targeted at IoT scenarios in areas like edge computing and computer vision for consumer electronics, Dai explained. And while it’s still early days for RISC-V-based chips, Alibaba and T-Head see an opportunity for the platform to grow beyond the edge. “Although the evolving RISC-V architecture is not yet mature enough in terms of technology and ecosystem, we believe it has great potential,” Pu said.

A Doubled Edged Sword

The challenges facing Chinese chipmakers are twofold. The first is architectural. With the exception of mobile and IoT, the world runs on x86 processors manufactured by Intel and AMD.

However, this is only half the problem. The second challenge facing China involves infrastructure, or rather the lack of it. Nearly every modern semiconductor is produced by a handful of companies in one of three countries: the U.S., Taiwan, and South Korea. T-Head’s XT910 is actually produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC).

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), China’s largest and most advanced chip fab, only recently gained the ability to produce chips based on a 14-nanometer node. By comparison, TSMC and Samsung are producing chips on a 5-nanometer node, and Intel is in the process of bringing 7-nanometer chips to market. So while RISC-V may be a promising alternative to x86 and Arm processors, China still has a ways to go to catch up with Western competitors.

This news was originally published at SDX Central.