For more than two decades, chips designed based on the Arm architecture have driven the mobile revolution and are installed in most of our world’s connected devices. However, Arm's neutrality will be questioned as Nvidia plans to acquire the British company. As one of the alternatives, is RISC-V ready?  
RISC-V, an open source processor architecture that celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, is growing in popularity among developers around the world. In recent months, there have been signs that RISC-V is ready to go mainstream.  
This month (November 2020), semiconductor company SiFive released HiFive Unmatched, a high-performance RISC-V circuit board, which is described as a "PC without a box." Even BBC Learning has jumped into action, partnering with online learning platform Tynker to create a Doctor Who-themed HiFive Inventor coding kit for children, which is believed to be the first RISC-V-based consumer product.  
   
“RISC-V is the first chip in the open source world to have such a big buzz,” said Mark Himelstein, a veteran Silicon Valley technologist who recently joined the nonprofit RISC-V International as CTO.  
Because it provides flexibility, customization, and the ability to collaborate with others around the world. Thirty years ago, manufacturing a computer chip required a team of 30 people to spend $100 million and take three years to complete. Last year, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, four undergraduate students designed and built a RISC-V chip in four months with a budget of $12,000.  
“We’ve seen a renaissance in software and databases and a renaissance in technology; the tools and manufacturing capabilities that exist are outstanding.”
         

Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm will bring uncertainty

The chip market continues to be dominated by two architectures. x86 in PCs and Arm in mobile devices.  
Arm's licensing model allows it to sell IP to chip manufacturers without producing any chips itself, making it the "Switzerland" of the chip market, and its neutrality with manufacturers is very popular among manufacturers. Its designs dominate the mobile phone market as well as other growth areas such as IoT devices and connected cars.  
   
Arm is one of the greatest success stories in the British technology sector. In 2016, Arm was sold to SoftBank for US$31 billion. Now it looks like it will change hands again, and Nvidia has agreed to acquire it for US$40 billion.  
If the U.S. company does close the deal, which still has many regulatory hurdles to clear around the world, maintaining neutrality could be tricky: "Nvidia competes in the same markets as several of Arm's existing customers," said Gartner vice president Alan Priestley.  
"It would be concerning if Nvidia tried to do any kind of consolidation," he added.
Some companies, such as Apple, license Arm's technology and create their own chips. Because Arm is so ubiquitous in the market, other companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek take standard Arm IP and put it into their products.  
These companies are active in the automotive space as well as edge and terminal areas where Nvidia is interested and wants to increase its application range. We could also see Arm chips increasingly used in other areas, such as data centers. ”
Alex van Someren, managing partner of Amadeus Capital, the deep technology venture fund founded by Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser, described the potential Nvidia acquisition as a "real disappointment" and said "Nvidia is not a suitable buyer for Arm. If the deal goes through, it will have extraordinary market dominance."
He added: "I imagine the UK government will try to get Nvidia to provide a contractually binding commitment to keep its licensing strategy neutral and allow everyone to use it. In practice, this is unenforceable and unlikely to be honored because this is not the commercial use Nvidia wants."
Intel, the dominant force in x86 processors, also faces an uncertain future. According to Tech Monitor, its market share has been slowly eroded by rival AMD, and Apple's recently announced M1 is an Arm-based chip with amazing processing speeds that can bring huge business opportunities to PCs beyond x86.  
         

Choose RISC-V?

Born out of the Parallel Computing Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010, RISC-V is a modular instruction set architecture (ISA) that allows developers to build any chip they want on top of the core instruction set. RISC-V International is now the focal point of a growing community of 750 members in 50 countries around the world.  
"It was built by the community in the same way as Linux or Apache," Himelstein said. "If you go back to 1990, people would say 'Why use Linux?' But now 30 years later, if you don't use Linux, you're stuck."
"This thing can last 50 years," he continued. "The way they set it up is there's a base set of 47 instructions, and you can add extension instructions on top of it. If there weren't those standards, people could add them themselves, so Alibaba recently created a server for the cloud."
De-Risc is a consortium of companies building platform technologies for the aerospace industry based on the RISC-V architecture involving software and hardware elements. Paco Gomez, CEO of fentISS, one of the partner companies, said: "One of the partners in the other consortium, Cobham Gaisler, has open source experience, and RISC-V is very attractive to us because it is an open standard."
"We have worked with Arm before but were always concerned that the European Space Agency might have issues with licensing, and we don't think that will happen with open standards.", he continued.  
FentISS produces the XtratuM hypervisor, the software that will form part of the platform (a hypervisor allows you to use a single computer to run multiple different virtual machines), and De-Risc hopes its system will be ready for European Space Agency certification sometime next year.  
         

The RISC-V wrestling match between the United States and China

Chips have been one of the front lines in the trade war between China and the United States.  
While relations between Washington and Beijing are likely to improve with Joe Biden in the White House, the possibility of Arm being brought under U.S. control through an Nvidia acquisition could spur China to develop more of its own chips, while the RISC-V architecture could tempt companies hoping to follow Alibaba's lead.  
Van Someren said that once Arm is controlled by Nvidia, it will fall under the purview of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). This means that CFIUS will potentially restrict the use of Arm-designed IP in products produced in countries such as China or the UK. ”
"CFIUS means the United States will ultimately control whether Arm designs can be licensed to customers," van Someren said. "This shifts the balance of power from Arm itself to the U.S. government."
He continued: “I think RISC-V is an important development. The idea of ​​a collaborative and open source approach to microprocessor design is really an ideal step.
It could take a decade for RiSC-V to hit the market and give Arm a really tough challenge, which is definitely a possibility. Because it is open and visible to all, this ties in closely with the topic of how modern IT development generally works in software and hardware. ”
Gartner’s Priestley isn’t convinced that the RISC-V architecture can overthrow Arm and Intel, saying it will take a lot of money to build a processor that can truly match Arm’s powerful A-core design.  
“You could build a RISC-V processor to compete with Arm cores, but you’d have to invest a lot of money in it, and that would require a company with great architectural design capabilities,” he said. “It’s not that it can’t be done, but it doesn’t exist yet.
"If someone like Qualcomm doesn't like the way Nvidia acquires Arm, it may do so, but it will be many years before we see the impact of the deal on the market."
He believes that RISC-V is more likely to "stay at the low end of the market" and be used to build simple single-core operations for low-end microcontrollers.  
Himelstein is optimistic.  
"This is exciting for CIOs and people who work in IT because we believe that having multiple architectures is good for business and good for technology. You don't have to have a one-size-fits-all solution," he said.
“Having a third option reflects global trends in the open source approach, which benefits pricing and gives you as a customer or implementer the opportunity to expand into new markets and address different workloads.”

Note: This article is reproduced from the Internet and supports the protection of intellectual property rights. Please indicate the original source and author when reprinting. If there is any infringement, please contact us to delete it.

Company phone number: +86-0755-83044319
Fax/FAX: +86-0755-83975897
Email: 1615456225@qq.com
QQ: 3518641314 Manager Li

QQ: 332496225 Manager Qiu

Address: Room 809, Building C, Zhantao Technology Building, No. 1079 Minzhi Avenue, Longhua New District, Shenzhen