On March 5, chip concept stocks rose, VeriSilicon shares (SH688521, share price 99.8 yuan, market value 49.94 billion yuan) rose by more than 11%, Guoxin Technology (SH688262, stock price 32.5 yuan, market value 10.92 billion yuan), Zhongke Lanxun (SH688332, stock price 124.88 yuan, market value 15.02 billion yuan) and other stocks followed suit. On the news side, RISC-V (an open instruction set architecture) chip has been hot recently.

In the CPU (central processing unit) instruction set architecture market, the x86 architecture dominates more than 90% of the PC and server market, and the Arm architecture occupies more than 90% of the mobile CPU market.

According to public information, RISC-V, an emerging open source architecture, was born in 2010, which is an open source instruction set architecture based on the principle of Reduced Instruction Set (RISC). In contrast to most instruction sets, RISC-V instruction sets are free to be used for any purpose, allowing any person or organization to freely use, modify, and expand. In addition to being flexible, RISC-V has more obvious advantages in terms of cost. In this context, the market is generally optimistic about the development prospects of domestic chips.

A few days ago, Ni Guangnan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said at the "2025 Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Conference" held by the Damo Academy: "Although RISC-V has only been released for a short period of 15 years, its position in the global chip industry chain is constantly improving. It is predicted that RISC-V chips will have a market share of more than 25% in the fields of consumer personal computers, autonomous driving, network communications, industrial control, intelligent devices and high-performance servers in the future, becoming the backbone of the global semiconductor industry that cannot be ignored. The open source model helps RISC-V build an inclusive and collaborative innovation global ecosystem, and become a new engine for the transformation of the chip industry. ”

RISC-V architecture: a breakthrough in the transformation of the chip industry

At present, the copyright of the mainstream instruction set architecture x86 and ARM architecture belongs to Intel Corporation of the United States and SoftBank Corporation of Japan, respectively. Whether it is a closed x86 architecture or an ARM architecture in the authorized mode, there is a risk of being restricted. The open-source nature of RISC-V and its gradual acceptance and recognition by mainstream manufacturers around the world make it feasible for Chinese chip manufacturers to realize technical independence in some fields through the RISC-V architecture.

Judging from the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain, Chinese manufacturers have been laid out in all aspects.

Specifically, in terms of chip IP (referring to the pre-designed and verified functional modules in chip design) design and development companies, VeriSilicon is the chairman unit of the China RISC-V Industry Alliance, and the company has six types of processor IPs, including independent and controllable graphics processor IP (GPU IP), neural network processor IP (NPU IP), video processor IP (VPU IP), and digital signal processor IP (DSP IP). and more than 1,600 digital-to-analog mixed IP and RF IP. In addition, according to the statistics of IPnest, an IP data analysis agency, in May 2024, VeriSilicon's IP licensing market share ranked first in China and eighth in the world in 2023.

According to VeriSilicon's recent investor relations activities, the company's current video transcoding platform project is progressing smoothly, and the one-stop chip customization project (including software and hardware collaborative verification) of VeriSilicon's second-generation video transcoding platform based on VeriSilicon IP has been basically completed, and the platform has enhanced the video transcoding capability of different formats to 8K on the basis of the original technology, and added artificial intelligence (AI) processing capabilities, high-performance multi-core RISC-V CPU and hardware encryption engine.

In addition, Alibaba's semiconductor company "Pingtouge" has also released the "XuanTie series" processor based on the RISC-V architecture. On February 28, the Damo Academy announced at the "2025 Xuantie RISC-V Ecosystem Conference" that the C930, its first server-class CPU, will be delivered in March. It is reported that the C930 general computing power performance test shows that the Xuantie RISC-V architecture has begun to enter high-performance application scenarios.

In terms of chip design, GigaDevice began to introduce the RISC-V architecture into the MCU (microcontrol unit) field in 2019, and launched the world's first 32-bit general-purpose MCU product based on RISC-V core, the GD32V series. At that time, the company said in the record of investor relations activities that an important reason for the company's release of RSIC-V was to focus on overseas markets.

At present, GigaDevice's RISC-V core MCU (micro control unit) products are mainly for wireless interconnection applications in home appliances and industrial fields, and the core technology of the company's MCU products is mainly peripherals, software support and solutions other than the core.

At the same time, chip design companies such as Beijing Junzheng are also conducting chip research and development based on RISC-V architecture.

Although RISC-V has been around for a relatively short time, the development of this architecture is ushering in a new historical opportunity: the arrival of the era of the Internet of Everything. According to a report by Semico Research, the number of chips using RISC-V architecture is expected to increase to 62.4 billion by 2025, with a compound growth rate of 146% from 2018 to 2025.

Can RISC-V be replaced?

From the perspective of the development law of x86 and ARM architecture, the development of emerging architecture needs to provide a growth environment for the ecosystem. Therefore, the lack of ecology is one of the bottlenecks that currently limit the rapid development of RISC-V. In fact, Intel has tried several times to cram x86 chips into connected mobile devices, but they have all failed.

In order to make the ecosystem more prosperous, RISC-V still has some problems that need to be solved urgently. On the one hand, there is still a big gap between RISC-V's toolbox, software, and hardware and x86 and ARM. On the other hand, there is still a shortage of talents for the RISC-V architecture, and many enterprises based on the RISC-V architecture need more talents at all levels such as chip design, verification solutions, and technical support.

In addition, from the perspective of scenarios, RISC-V has gained a firm foothold in the embedded/IoT market, but it will still take some time to expand into high-performance applications such as mobile, computers, and servers.

A brokerage analyst who did not want to be named told reporters: "Judging from the delivery of Xuantie C930, the server market will be broken through the fastest, and it is expected to be applied on a large scale within 5~8 years." The ecological barriers to mobile are relatively high, and Google has tried to support RISC-V in Android, but it has been delayed due to immature ecology. (Because) developers need to adapt a large amount of code by themselves, and Arm's software and hardware ecology on the mobile terminal has formed a monopoly, the migration cost is extremely high, so it is estimated that it will take 5~10 years to break through. On the computer side, it will take more than 10 years. At present, the main frequency and single-core performance of RISC-V PC processors (such as HiFive Unmatched) lag far behind x86, and they lack supporting IPs such as GPUs (graphics processing units) and high-speed interconnection, which are difficult to meet the needs of desktop-level applications. ”

Cover picture source: Photo by Wen Duo, Daily Economic News