Breaking the monopoly of x86 and ARM: Will RISC-V win finally?

In the global market, the x86 architecture has an absolute share in the high-performance CPU market, and the ARM architecture is unmatched in the low-power market.

These two monopolize most of the CPU market.

In the future, it may be RISC-V. , Jim Keller, who has worked in AMD and Intel for many years, also mentioned RISC-V would win.

Who is Jim Keller? Many people have heard of him, and many people do not know. He has more than 20 years of experience in the semiconductor industry.

Before 1998, he participated in the development of Alpha processors at DEC. After 1998, he joined AMD and participated in the development of K7 and J8 architecture CPUs.

He resigned. Later, he participated in the CPU research and development of Broadcom, PA Semi and Apple. In 2012, he returned to AMD and participated in the Zen processor research and development.

In 2016, he left AMD half a year before the Zen processor went on sale, and went to Tesla to develop autonomous driving chips .

The AI chip of the RISC-V architecture is claimed to surpass AMD/NVIDIA.

He has participated in the development of Alpha, x86, ARM and other architectures in the chip industry, and now it is mainly the RISC-V architecture.

After understanding these backgrounds, he can understand his position on RISC-V. He believes that RISC-V will win in the future.

The reason is also very simple, RISC-V chips are now feasible and open standards, innovation in this area is happening, and it is rising faster than other architectures.

Even considering that he himself is engaged in the research and development of RSIC-V, Jim Keller’s summary of the four advantages of RISC-V is very objective.

This is also the current reality. Compared with x86 and ARM architecture, RISC-V is in performance, There are obviously deficiencies in issues such as ecology, but its openness and development speed are far faster than the other two architectures.

In July of this year, Calista Redmond, CEO of the RISC-V International Foundation, said that open standards are the key.

“Linux has done this in software, and we’re doing it in hardware,” she said. “We estimate that there are already 10 billion cores on the market,” she said.

What is this concept? Even the ARM architecture took 17 years to ship 10 billion cores, and it didn’t happen until 2008.

She believes RISC-V can reach ARM’s 20-year achievement within the next five years.