Many semiconductor giants join forces to accelerate RISC-V
Many semiconductor giants join forces to accelerate RISC-V
Many semiconductor giants join forces to accelerate RISC-V
Early on Friday morning (Aug. 04), Qualcomm, NXP, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor and Bosch issued a joint statement announcing that they have jointly established a joint venture to promote the development of RISC-V architecture by supporting next-generation hardware development. Global adoption.
(Source: Qualcomm official website)
Having said that, we must first mention what RISC-V is and why we mention Arm.
As the centerpiece of chip design, the instruction set defines exactly how the processor operates . In the history of mankind, Complex Instruction Set Computing (CISC) was first born. Such processors are designed to execute complex instructions.
The most typical example is Intel’s x86 architecture . Later, as the performance bottleneck of the computer appeared, people began to look for ways to optimize the instruction set.
By reducing the complexity of the instruction set, each instruction can be completed within one CPU cycle, that is, reduced instruction set computing (RISC ) , Qualcomm The Snapdragon 8 uses the ARM RISC architecture.
In the history of the development of the RISC architecture, it was IBM who first created the 801 processor in the 1970s. In the 1980s, Acorn successfully developed the RISC chip and named it the Acorn RISC Machine, which is also the source of the Arm company’s name.
Today, after more than 30 years of development, more than 90% of smartphones and tablets now use Arm-based chips .
However, Arm is a closed architecture. Many manufacturers not only have to pay patent fees and licensing fees to Arm, but also have many restrictions on their design solutions.
For this reason, Professor David Patterson, who has been studying the RISC field since the 1980s, led a team in Berkeley, California, and developed the RISC-V open source architecture ten years ago.
Since this architecture does not have too much historical burden, it has the advantages of open source (free), simple design, and easy modular design .
However, there is still a clear gap between the software development ecology and decades of accumulation.
