[News] China Established a New Platform for Developing Chip Industry

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Recently, the Future Chip Innovation Research Institute of Xiong’an New Area was officially established in Hebei, China.

According to the official Wechat account of “Xiong’an New Area,” the Future Chip Innovation Research Institute of Xiong’an New Area was jointly founded by the RISC-V Working Committee of the China Electronics Standardization Association, Chipup, ESWIN, and Stream Computing as the initial sponsors.

The research institute will engage in technical research and development, product testing, standard formulation, evaluation, application demonstration, and collaboration based on the RISC-V open instruction set, promoting the high-quality development of the RISC-V industry in Xiong’an New Area.

RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture (ISA) based on the principles of Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC). Currently, open source has become a new model for global collaborative innovation. As an advanced and easily-customizable architecture, the open-source RISC-V is still in the early stage of development in terms of ecosystem.

At present, RISC-V has not only become the preferred CPU architecture in many fields in China, including IoT, industrial, medical, intelligent connected vehicles, general computing, and communication computing, but also injecting strong momentum into technological innovation and industrial transformation in the global chip industry. It is expected to gain a foothold in the CPU field and compete with x86 and ARM.

Data shows that in 2022, 10 billion processors based on the RISC-V architecture were shipped, a scale that took x86 and ARM 30 years to achieve. The industry expects that by 2025, the number of RISC-V cores will increase to 80 billion. With the advent of the artificial intelligence (AI) era, RISC-V is also expected to embrace new development opportunities.

Currently, the overall AI chip market is still dominated by GPU (Like NVIDIA, AMD), followed by Arm. TrendForce pointed out that, RISC-V has made some investment in data center in recent years, and with efforts from NVIDIA and CSPs, RISC-V is expected to become another niche market, possibly targeting the open-source AI market (Like Meta) or other niche applications.

(Photo credit: RISC-V Working Committee)