RISC-V accelerates entering the industrial-grade market jumping technology NB2 chip to mass production at the end of the year

21st Century Business Herald Reporter Ni Yuqing Shenzhen Report

Emerging architecture RISC-V is favored by many organizations and enterprises due to open source, neutral, streamlined attributes. In recent years, in addition to the two strong chip architectures of X86 and ARM, RISC-V is rapidly rising.

A strong signal is more and more companies joining the RISC-V camp. Among them, there are not only domestic head manufacturers such as Alibaba and Huawei, but also start -ups such as Yueyu Technology. Globally, even the X86 giant Intel has clearly made the CPU of the RISC-V architecture. This year, the MCU large factory Risa also bluntly put it into the Risc-V route development.

Another trend is that the RISC-V manufacturer gradually moves towards high performance and high-end market, and is no longer limited to low-end IoT scenarios. Recently, LEAPFIVE launched the first SOC product NB2 and supporting board card products with the first RISC-V architecture, using 12nm process, facing marginal computing, deep learning, machine vision and voice processing. It is currently the first Full Mask's RISC-V architecture high-end application processor, which will be mass-produced in the fourth quarter of this year.

Cut into the high -end market of the Industrial IoT

As the demand of RISC-V in China heated up, domestic startups have continued to emerge. For example, Yueyin Technology, founded in 2020, focuses on the RISC-V architecture SOC chip product. Its founder Jiang Zhaohui was the chief technology officer of Google. Essence

Talking about the reasons for entering the RISC-V track, Jiang Zhaohui, the founder of the technology and CEO of Yueyu Technology, told reporters that the company has three thoughts in chip innovation. The first is for dual carbon service, and the power saves on the chip; the second It is a platform that focuses on global carbon. Data must be safe, traceable, and not tampered with; the most important thing is to ensure that the industrial chain is autonomous and controllable, so RISC-V as an open source CPU architecture is a very good choice.

From the product level, there are currently three chip platforms in Yueyu Technology, which covers from low -end and middle -end to high -end. Specific SOC products including BF, GF and NB series. Among them, the latest NB is a high-end flagship, using a 44-bit RISC-V instruction set of the 4-core CPU architecture. At the same time, it adds AI, GPU, DSP and other heterogeneous processors to directly enter the huge industrial-grade market.

Yueyu Technology R & D Yuan Bo said that among the chip products based on RISC-V, more than 95%are concentrated in the MCU level, and there are very few high-end categories. Too good, this is forced to make a simple control-level chip when many manufacturers take the RISC-V technology into the chip product, and the homogeneity is very serious. "

As a result, Yuexun Technology wants to make differentiated competition in the high -end industrial Internet of Things. After clarifying the route, it is more important to land. It is understood that the NB2 has already won the order in the power scenario.

Pu Tianjiao, director of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence Application, China Institute of Electric Power Sciences Co., Ltd., introduced that the development of power IoT has high data transmission processing pressure, heavy load in the cloud main station, the value of massive data value cannot be tapped, chip supply is difficult to supply difficulty And other issues. Therefore, new requirements have been proposed for the high computing power, low power consumption, and controlling control of the edge of power. After investigation, the Chinese Academy of Electrical Sciences chose the technical route of the main control+AI accelerator, adopted the RISC-V open source instruction set, and signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Yueyu Technology. Application systems and other applications.

How does RISC-V ecosystem grow?

Since its development, the CPU has two major instruction sets. The complex instruction set (CISC) architecture X86, the streamlined instruction set (RISC) architecture camp includes ARM, MIPS and RISC-V. RISC-V is the fifth-generation instruction set architecture based on the principle of "streamlined instruction set". As a new forces, while booming, it still faces the challenge of ecological construction. In addition to the structure, there are more operating systems, application software, etc. Support for dimensions.

In an interview with reporters, Jiang Zhaohui said that the RISC-V is the same as ARM ten years ago. ARM also encountered the same challenge. In her opinion, RISC-V has three major advantages. The first is that the RISC-V ecology has now received global support. Now the RISC-V foundation has more than 2,000 companies to join, which also means the prosperity of the community. The second advantage is that the country attaches great importance to RISC-V, and has established many national institutions to conduct research around RISC-V.

"The third advantage, we should not think that RISC-V must replace ARM, or must replace X86, because these three tracks will be parallel at the same time. Because many applications have determined the architecture below, such as the data center, such as the data center Most of the mature applications can only run in X86, and it is impossible to migrate to RISC-V. But when RISC-V, ARM, X86 is parallel, we can make some heterogeneous chips, preferential will be prioritized, and we will give priority The less complicated application migrate into the RISC-V architecture, which can be considered in the future. "Jiang Chaohui further said.

Both chip entrepreneurship and ecological construction require more investment and patience. For the popular fields such as RISC-V in recent years, it is necessary to move forward with caution. Hundreds of millions of chip competitions must be closely integrated with demand.In Jiang Chaohui's view, the industrial Internet of Things is very large. From smart logistics to smart energy, and then to smart cities, it is a trillions of markets. "We don’t need to worry about not returning.You can make money in a year or two, at least three years. Now starting to enter the third year, the next step is to dig deep in the market. "

Yuan Bo said: "The chip is a strategic investment, and it is already very good in three years. It is five years under normal circumstances, and there is a certain complexity. We found that the small chip is very tired because the unit price is too low.The company you want is long -term continuous development, and it must be able to solve the actual problems. Chip products should be at least more or more positioned. "

Next, the high-end competition of RISC-V will kick off.

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