In fact, the Internet giants have stepped into the chip field, which has already caused quite a stir in the industry. Recently, GV, the venture capital organization of Google’s parent company Alphabet, led a total of US$56 million in financing from AI hardware company Samba Nova Systems. Representing Alphabet in the field of artificial intelligence chips.
Promote AliOS deployment and application in IoT chip field
Recently, Alibaba’s market value officially surpassed Facebook to become a truly 'big tyrant' in the Internet field. However, Alibaba’s layout has not only stopped at e-commerce, finance, logistics, and cloud computing. It was at the Shenzhen Yunqi Convention recently. Hu Xiaoming, senior vice president of Alibaba Group, and Hu Xiaoming, president of Alibaba Cloud, formally announced that they have fully entered the field of IoT. IoT has become Alibaba Group's new 'main track'.
Hu Xiaoming stated at the conference that Alibaba Cloud IoT is positioned as the builder of the IoT infrastructure. Alibaba Cloud plans to connect 10 billion devices in the next five years. In addition, to meet the new challenges brought by the Internet of Things, Alibaba Cloud will be in 2018. The strategic investment in the "edge computing" this emerging technology area, to create the world's first 'ubiquitous cloud'.
It is understood that the Internet of Things department has also made new adjustments recently. It has jumped one level within Alibaba and is directly affiliated with the cloud computing department.
In order to promote the deployment and application of AliOS in the IoT chip field, Alibaba Cloud has also promoted the IoT chip in the chip field, applied it on the terminal in a large scale through Alibaba Cloud Link Market, and further optimized AliOS Things.
As an IC design company with a focus on investment in Ali, Hangzhou Zhongtian Micro CEO Qi Xiaoning told DIGITIMES that this is a very important strategic layout.
The strategic cooperation between Zhongtian Micro and its major shareholder Alibaba is mainly two lines. The first line is through the integration of CPU and Ali OS. Qi Xiaoning believes that in the Internet age, wintel dominates this market; while in the era of mobile Internet, ARM+Andorid Leading the market, he believes that Zhongtian Micro's CPU and Ali cloud OS will lead the market in the era of IOT.
At the same time, Qi Xiaoning also believes that cloud chips must be combined with big data to generate value. The hardware that the chip can provide includes RF, IP Driver, Sensor Driver, and security encryption hardware. Based on this hardware foundation, it can be easily implemented on Alibaba Cloud's API. Build an ecosystem.
Hard and soft fusion 'value beyond silicon'
Therefore, Zhongtian Micro will focus on the core technologies of 'security', 'access' and 'intelligence', and promote the ecological construction of the IoT industry. Three 'cloud chips' based on the AliOS software and hardware framework, including computer vision chips, converged Into the secure MCU platform chip, and the world's first AliOS-based ultra-low-power NB-IoT IoT security chip launched in cooperation with ZTE Microelectronics.
Qi Xiaoning believes that the value of IoT is in sensing, connectivity and intelligence, as well as good value services. For hardware companies, providing good services is a short board, and semiconductor companies will provide more value on a hardware basis in the future.' Value beyond silicon' It is obviously not enough to go forward by Moore's Law alone, but also to provide more application value. It is necessary to integrate with big data.
When it comes to the IoT market, Qi Xiaoning thinks that it focuses on three important areas: industry, healthcare, and consumption. Because the IoT market has short-term, fast-changing, and subdivided application fields, it is also difficult for the IoT semiconductor market to see large volumes. One of the main reasons for significant growth.
It is understood that Zhongtian Micro currently has more than 70 cooperative manufacturers, and the cumulative shipments of SoC chips have exceeded 500 million. It is only the first annual chip shipments in 2016 that has broken 100 million.
At the same time, he is also quite optimistic about the extensive application of smart surveillance in smart cities. Zhongtian Micro has now developed the next generation of video learning technology with a deep learning structure description and identification technology chip solution, and has been adopted by major domestic video surveillance manufacturers.
China's RISC architecture has great potential for independent research and development
In fact, Ali is committed to building an open cloud computing ecosystem, and it also coincides with the RISC-V road of Zhongtian Micro's embedded CPU architecture.
Due to the different and complex application scenarios of the Internet of Things, the hardware design needs to be more efficient, especially some customized designs. The IoT hardware often needs to be more flexible and economical for customers and cloud computing. RISC-V belongs to a fully open source processor Designs, such as AI, driverless cars, VR/AR, robots, etc., RISC-V is adopting these chip-level new technologies for applications that are at the forefront of innovation. Qi Xiaoning also analyzed that she is currently taking the autonomous instruction set architecture in China and mastering its own R & D code, RISC-V has a simple, very low power consumption, embedded features, in the Internet of things market should have bright prospects.
In the near future, RISC-V is also planning to increase brand awareness through more domestic industry activities, and expand its influence in the Chinese market in the context of increasing RISC-V architecture and product demand.