#081 SPECIAL FEATURE - China’s AI Domination Helped By US Developed Tech
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AI BYTE # 📢: China’s AI Domination Helped By US Developed Tech
⭐ The semiconductor industry is undergoing a major shift, as a decade-old standard for designing chips called RISC-V is gaining traction among technology companies looking for ways to innovate, reduce costs and stay ahead of the competition.
RISC-V, pronounced “risk five”, is an open-standard instruction set architecture (ISA) that allows anyone to design, manufacture and sell processors based on the RISC-V specification — without royalties or license fees.
RISC-V was created in 2010 partly with backing by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s research arm, and was pursued initially as a tool for academics to work on projects without paying royalties for proprietary systems.
It was released in 2015 as a free and open-standard ISA, opening the door for a variety of companies to develop their own RISC-V processors, allowing them to innovate in ways that would have been impossible before for a wide range of product categories and applications.
RISC-V is an emerging rival to two long-dominant proprietary models from Intel Corp. and Arm Holdings Ltd., a British company that U.S. graphics-chip maker Nvidia Inc. agreed in September to acquire for $40 billion.
Intel and Arm have defined the base-level instructions for processors that power personal computers, smartphones, servers and other devices, and charge licensing fees for their use.
RISC-V, by contrast, is open-sourced, meaning its technical details are public and changes are openly debated. This gives architects, designers and developers more flexibility and control over their processor designs, and lowers the barriers to entry for new players.
RISC-V’s backers, which include prominent researchers and major companies in the U.S., hope it will do for hardware what the open-source movement did for software, shifting power from big incumbents and democratizing the plumbing of modern computing. “People are fired by this vision and moving ahead because they see it as a long-term bet,” said David Patterson, one of the pioneers behind RISC-V.
RISC-V adoption has accelerated in recent years, as the technology has matured and gained support from a growing ecosystem of companies, organizations and developers.
Membership in RISC-V International, a body that promotes the standard, climbed by 64% last year to more than 750 members, said Calista Redmond, the group’s chief executive. RISC-V International also relocated last year from the U.S. to Switzerland, to address member concerns that their work could be caught up in U.S. export restrictions.
RISC-V has also attracted interest from China, which is moving swiftly to reduce its dependence on Western chip technology amid growing limits from Washington on buying American semiconductors.
China’s online retail and tech giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. developed what some industry insiders consider the highest-performance RISC-V chip in production, and is using it in its data centers to perform artificial intelligence calculations.
Other Chinese companies, such as Huawei Technologies Co., Biren Technology Co. and Loongson Technology Corp., have also invested in RISC-V projects.
RISC-V is not without challenges, however. The technology still lags behind in performance and compatibility to what Intel and Arm currently offer, and faces competition from other open-source chip initiatives, such as OpenPOWER and OpenSPARC.
RISC-V also needs to overcome the network effects and inertia that favor the established players, who have built loyal customer bases and large software libraries over the years.
Moreover, RISC-V could face regulatory hurdles, as some U.S. officials view China’s embrace of the standard with alarm, and worry that it could give China an advantage in key technologies.
Despite these obstacles, RISC-V has shown great potential to reshape the chip industry and challenge the status quo. As the demand for high-performance and specialized chips for artificial intelligence, mobile devices, automotive and other applications grows, RISC-V could offer a viable and cost-effective alternative to the proprietary models.
RISC-V could also enable a new wave of innovation and collaboration in the semiconductor sector, as more companies and developers join the open-source movement and contribute to the advancement of the standard. RISC-V is creating a new, collaborative era of processor innovation, and it is only getting started.