Episode micro-network news (text / Xiaobei) Beijing time on July 11th, the Arm spokesperson admitted that the RISC-V architecture website (riscv-basics.com) is indeed released by Arm, 'this is to enhance discussion The chip architecture, rather than maliciously attacking RISC-V', and announced that the site has been taken offline.
Appeared in the search headline was forced to get off the shelf in just a few days, riscv-basics.com 'short-live' behind the 'roaming' of different vendors and free software communities. This story will start from a few days ago, some netizens found Using Google to search for RISC-V, the first search result was purchased from the riscv-basics.com website, which is based on the cost, ecosystem, fragmentation risk, security issues, design verification and five aspects of RISC- Questioning V.
Coincidentally, Arm's official website also has extremely similar content.
Subsequently, the community established a website arm-basics.com to roar back. The website revealed the actual situation of Arm. For example, Arm's instruction set authorization must occupy 1% of the product's sales commission. The Arm instruction set is very fragmented in nature. The closed-source ecosystem leads to a huge time cost in the verification phase and reveals Arm's black history in security.
In addition, Arm-basics.com also acknowledges that the current RISC-V ecosystem is much weaker than the Arm ecosystem, but is in a high-speed growth period.
Arm's FUD market strategy was not only as bad as expected, but also angered by many vendors and the free software community.
Riscv-basics.com's downline or Arm's helplessness, Arm's 'attack' against RISC-V may have just begun.
Today's processors, SoC is basically dominated by the closed instruction set architecture (ISA) such as x86 and Arm. Who can become the Linux in the microprocessor is the industry's discussion and expectation.
Before the arrival of RISC-V, there were already several open source instruction set architectures, such as SPARC V8, OpenRISC. Since there is already an open source instruction set architecture, why should we develop RISC-V? Because OpenRISC license is GPL, it means All instruction sets must be open sourced after modification. The RISC-V license is licensed under the BSD License. Any academic institution or business organization can use the RISC-V architecture for free.
In the past two years, RISC-V has received attention and attention from academia and industry. The industry recognition of RISC-V architecture has rapidly increased. Google, Qualcomm, Samsung, Huawei, Tesla and other industry giants have joined RISC-V. Foundations, emerging products and solutions based on this architecture are beginning to emerge in the market.
At the critical moment of the ARM mobile processor market, and entering the PC and server market, RISC-V was launched. In the short term, RISC-V is difficult to shake the market dominated by Arm and other products monopolized by Arm. The industry agrees that Some emerging edge areas, such as IoT, AI, edge computing, etc., RISC-V and Arm are at the same starting line, the two will form a positive competition, RISC-V has advantages in terms of cost, Arm has advantages in ecology and so on. The bottleneck in the law is the most profound change in the semiconductor industry in recent years. Although the process is still moving forward, the price is going up. In the case of the Internet of Things market, the market is more sensitive to cost, RISC-V. The free license attribute makes many manufacturers feel at ease. At the same time, RISC-V has the advantage of flexible modification of instruction and chip architecture design for different applications, and Arm can only do a standardized design, it is difficult to achieve differentiation.
In addition, RISC-V has three competitive features: minimalist, modular, and scalable. The original intention of RISC-V design is to solve the limitations of complexity and related intellectual property, so simplicity is its greatest feature. 1. RISC-V is a modular instruction set that can be combined with some extended instruction sets. The Arm instruction set is not allowed to be extended, and RISC-V is different.
At present, RISC-V is still in its infancy, ecology is the biggest shortcoming, and the competition with Arm is indeed 'sweet', but it is not without the potential of competition. Currently, Western Digital, AMD, Micron, Google, Samsung are using RISC-V does some chip projects. The RISC-V Foundation has absorbed more than 100 corporate members including mainstream companies such as Google, Qualcomm, Apple and Tesla. In recent years, RISC-V has also achieved certain success in the Chinese market. Development, there are large enterprises such as Huawei and ZTE, and some small and medium-sized enterprises and makers join the RISC-V Foundation. In the face of this growing competitor, Arm will naturally not relax their vigilance, Arm to RISC-V 'Blow' may just begin.