After solving the mass production problem, China’s RISC-V is moving upwards.
On August 13th, at the 5th Dishui Lake China RISC-V Industry Forum held in Lingang, Shanghai, Dai Weimin, Chairman, CEO, and President of Xinyuan Corporation, recalled in an interview with Interface News that in the early days, the industry was often asked “if chips can be produced”, but today this is no longer a problem, and the focus is on the speed of implementation and ecological construction.
01
RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture that is at the same level as Arm and x86. After sprouting from Berkeley Lab in 2010, it began to enter the industrial field and was mainly applied in markets such as MCU and IoT. With the expansion of chip mass production, RISC-V is now expanding towards servers AI、 Extending to more complex scenarios such as cars.
In the past year, giants such as Qualcomm and Nvidia have placed bets on the RISC-V architecture through acquisitions, partnerships, and other means. Dai Weimin believes that the future trend of RISC-V is definitely “unstoppable” and will inevitably form a tripartite confrontation with x86 and Arm.
The Shanghai Dishui Lake Forum has been held for five consecutive sessions. Official data shows that the forum has recommended more than 40 new domestic RISC-V chip products, with an overall production rate of over 90%. Dai Weimin told Interface News that the forum now receives so many chip recommendations that they need to be constantly screened. The organizers even conduct on-site research to confirm the production situation, indicating that more and more Chinese manufacturers are producing truly mass-produced products.
The market size is rapidly expanding synchronously. Dai Weimin cited data from SHD Group, stating that the global shipment of RISC-V SoCs is expected to reach approximately 6.9 billion units by 2025, and is projected to increase to approximately 36 billion units by 2031, with a compound annual growth rate of 31.7%. The size of the Chinese market is expected to grow from approximately $24 billion in 2025 to approximately $86.4 billion in 2031. Rong Yi, Secretary General of the Shanghai Integrated Circuit Industry Association, quoted Wedbush Securities’ analysis at the forum that the market penetration rate of RISC-V has reached 25%, and one out of every four chips worldwide adopts the RISC-V architecture.
RISC-V will also extend its tentacles to more fields. Hu Zhenbo, founder of Xinlai Technology, believes that RISC-V in the embedded field has blossomed in various ways today, and mobile application processors have a certain foundation. The PC field is currently relatively quiet, but the development momentum of the server market is very strong.
In the past, RISC-V mainly focused on low performance requirements, and the market valued its cost and customization capabilities. Today, it is starting to challenge higher thresholds.
02
Among the 10 chips recommended by this year’s forum, the progress in the server direction has attracted much attention. The RISC-V+AI fusion server CPU LX500 from Bluechip Computing has entered mass production of server products. In July of this year, it collaborated with Lenovo to discontinue the RISC-V server, and operators and state-owned enterprise data centers have begun small-scale deployment. The server chip V100 of Jindian Space has completed chip production, and Lingrui Chip has also released the P100 for servers.
Dai Weimin summarized the market direction of RISC-V into three directions: the high-end market represented by data centers, the IoT fragmentation market, and edge scenarios such as industrial and autonomous driving. He said, ‘The high-end is faster than we expected.’.
AI has accelerated this process. In recent years, the demand for AI computing has rapidly expanded, and more and more devices such as robots, cars, and cameras need to perform inference, perception, and control locally. This gives RISC-V the opportunity to bypass traditional competitive markets and overtake on the curve.
For example, K3 in the iterative spacetime has already entered robot applications; Teppus’ chips integrate sensing, control, navigation, and other capabilities into a single chip; Yisiwei’s automotive grade electronic rearview mirror chip EAI8800 has an end-to-end delay of less than 20 milliseconds.
As for which scenarios are the first to increase volume, there is no consensus in the industry yet. Li Huaqing, Vice President of Lingrui Zhixin, believes that intelligent security with relatively mature algorithms may increase production earlier, and robots are a longer-term opportunity. Huashan Capital partner Wang Zhiwei is cautious about the short-term outbreak of AI glasses, believing that robots may begin to penetrate from industrial scenarios. Dai Weimin reminds that comprehensive deployment may also be a problem, and it is necessary to choose the market and intentionally guide the direction that is easy to implement.
Dai Weimin, Chairman of Xinyuan Corporation. Photo by Interface News Reporter
03
After entering the high-end market, the problems faced by RISC-V are also changing.
Dai Weimin repeatedly emphasized that RISC-V is “open” rather than “open-source”. The RISC-V industry in China has begun to establish a patent alliance, with the number of members increasing from 9 in 2023 to 24, and 161 patents entering the pool. His explanation is that an open instruction set is equivalent to giving everyone a “dictionary” that can be freely used, but the articles written can still infringe. Therefore, centralized patents aim to form a defense capability when member companies encounter intellectual property risks.
Compared to patents, software presents a greater challenge. Dai Weimin gave an example to Interface News, stating that ARM also faced ecological pressure when it evolved towards the high-end market. After RISC-V enters the server and AI markets, it is often important for developers to quickly complete compilation, debugging, and deployment after receiving the chip. A mature architecture ecosystem requires the participation of operating systems, development tools, software application ecosystems, and developers.
Shanghai, where Xinyuan Corporation is located, is currently the city with the strongest support for the development of the RISC-V chip industry. In 2018, the China RISC-V Industry Alliance was established in Shanghai. In 2024, the Shanghai Open Processor Industry Innovation Center was unveiled in Lingang. For five consecutive years, the Drip Lake Forum has also brought together chip design companies, upstream and downstream enterprises, and application providers.
In Dai Weimin’s view, ecological issues will eventually be resolved in the future, and there are no fundamental bottlenecks in the development of China’s RISC-V industry. It’s just a matter of time.
相关文章
