Recently, a number of US politicians have pressed the Biden administration to regulate RISC-V in the name of "national security."
RISC-V, what is it?
What impact will it have on the development of China's chip industry?
As we all know, computers need programs to run, and programs are made up of a series of instructions.
It can be said that instructions are the bottom layer of computer operation.
The quality of instructions, to some extent, determines the speed of computer operation.
To use an imprecise analogy, instructions are words, programs are sentences, and computers are books.
Different words, composed of different sentences, compiled into different books, also constitute the corresponding ecology.
At present, the instruction set structure can be divided into complex instruction set and reduced instruction set.
There are three mainstream, respectively, X86, ARM, RISC-V.
Among them, RISC-V is special.
RISC-V architecture diagram
The reason is that X86, ARM is exclusive, RISC-V is open source.
The X86 instruction set, developed by Intel in the United States, has occupied most of the market for PCS and servers.
The ARM instruction set, owned by the British ARM company, is mainly used in consumer electronics, but also gradually used in notebook computers.
These two instruction sets belong to one enterprise, so other enterprises must be authorized to use them.
Take the British company ARM, which makes money by licensing its designs to other companies, with annual revenues of $2.68 billion and a market value of $55 billion.
Founded in 2010 by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, the RISC-V instruction set is open source and free, allowing anyone to design, manufacture, and sell RISC-V chips and software.
A RISC-V prototype chip held by Yunsup Lee, one of the original developers of RISC-V
Compared with X86 and ARM, RISC-V has several advantages:
One is free, the first two have to pay licensing fees, RISC-V does not need.
The instruction set of RISC-V architecture is relatively simple, which not only reduces the difficulty of development, but also helps to improve the execution efficiency and performance of the CPU.
Third, open, enterprises can not only customize and optimize according to demand, but also do not have to worry about being cut off or restricted.
Not afraid to cut off supply, is the current Chinese chip enterprises urgently need.
In recent years, RISC-V has received increasing attention from the industry.
Google, needless to say, is itself a major promoter of open source.
At the RISC-V Summit 2022 at the end of last year, Google said that it hopes RISC-V can be on an equal footing with ARM and become the first-tier platform supported by Android.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon mobile phone chip uses Arm architecture, but it has been unhappy with Arm because of licensing issues.
In August this year, Qualcomm joined hands with Bosch, Infineon, Nordic and NXP to form a new company dedicated to the development of RISC-V chips, focusing on RISC-V chips for automotive applications, and gradually expanding to mobile communications and the Internet of Things.
Even Intel, the "originator" of X86, is also paying attention to and investing in RISC-V.
Chinese companies have been more aggressive than their American counterparts.
On the one hand, the Chinese market is large, and there is a demand for strong computing power in the fields of server and supercomputing, AI training and inference, which provides a broad space for RISC-V development.
Chinese institutions and enterprises such as the Institute of Computing Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ali Pingtou Brother, and Xinlai Technology have laid out RISC-V and developed software and hardware solutions at different levels.

Xuantie 910
On the other hand, RISC-V has the advantages of not being restricted by monopoly and easy to guarantee supply chain security, which also brings new opportunities for China's chip industry.
Take Huawei for example, starting in 2019, ARM no longer licenses the latest architecture version.
Huawei Hisilicon quickly entered the RISC-V camp and launched RISC-V architecture TV chips, occupying 60% of the TV chip market share.
Domestically, RISC-V is seen as a candidate alternative and is rapidly developing.
Statistics show that in 2022, chip shipments using RISC-V architecture have reached 10 billion, half of which are from China.
RISC-V Ecology
At present, half of the RISC-V International Foundation's senior members are Chinese companies.
List of RISC-V International Foundation Senior Members
According to the data revealed by the RISC-V International Foundation, the number of members of the foundation increased by more than 26% last year, with more than 3,180 members in 70 countries/regions, there are more than 10 billion RISC-V cores on the market, and RISC-V architecture chips are expected to exceed 80 billion by 2025.
RISC-V is developing rapidly, and Chinese enterprises are gradually becoming the backbone of it.
In the eyes of some US politicians, the Chinese chip industry has opened a "new front" that can evade US controls.
This is precisely what they fear and cannot tolerate.
So the question is, if the United States is capable of regulating RISC-V?
It's hard.
Because the RISC-V architecture is not in the hands of American companies, nor does it belong to any agency or country, the United States has no regulatory grip.
If the U.S. government wants to regulate, it can ban American companies from participating in RISC-V development.
This is tantamount to standing pat.
Therefore, Chinese companies can shrug off the clamor of American politicians.
However, we should not overestimate the role of RISC-V.
As mentioned above, it is expected that by 2025, RISC-V architecture chips are expected to exceed 80 billion.
By comparison, more than 250 billion ARM-based chips have been shipped.
RISC-V is not in the same order of magnitude as Arm in terms of scale.
Whether a technology can be widely used depends not only on the technical performance itself, but also on the industrial ecology.
The RISC-V architecture is open source and free, and can be used by any manufacturer, which also makes it difficult to harmonize between them.
More importantly, compared with X86 and Arm, RISC-V is a latecomer and the industry ecosystem is too small.
Arm, for example, has more than 15 million software developers, and 70% of the world's people use Arm products.
The ecosystem built by X86 and Arm is like an impenetrable barrier, blocking competitors.
Arm server ecosystem
Therefore, RISC-V is promising, but Chinese companies should not be too optimistic.
From a more macro perspective, RISC-V is just a small link in the chip industry chain.
If China's chip industry wants to break through, it still needs to work for a long time and step by step.
There are two recent news:
First, based on the integrated storage computing paradigm, Tsinghua University has developed the world's first full-system integration, supporting efficient on-chip learning (machine learning can be completed directly at the hardware end) memristor memory and computing integrated chip.
The second is the US government's decision to provide US semiconductor equipment to Samsung and SK Hynix factories in China without other licenses.
Memristor memory and computing integrated learning chip and test system
There have been breakthroughs in independent research and development, external controls have been relaxed, and Chinese enterprises continue to refuel.