News Huawei's HiSilicon Develops First RISC-V Design to Overcome Arm Restrictions

[Admin]

Huawei's HiSilicon developed its first RISC-V design as it looks to circumvent US restrictions on Arm licensing.

Huawei's HiSilicon Develops First RISC-V Design to Overcome Arm Restrictions : Read more

 

[InvalidError]

One more small step toward China's CPU independence and technology blockades against it becoming useless.

 

[escksu]

Hope USA will understand that with the vast resources China has, its only a matter of time before it develops all its technology needed and render USA restriction useless.....all these trade war did very little impact to China....

 

[spongiemaster]

Hope USA will understand that with the vast resources China has, its only a matter of time before it develops all its technology needed and render USA restriction useless.....all these trade war did very little impact to China....

And all the lost revenue US companies are going to see from not servicing such as vast market isn't exactly going to benefit them either.

 

[excalibur1814]

Don't worry, China will soon own everything and everyone.

 

[wr3zzz]

It will be so ironic if China leverages open source tech like RISC-V to develop a brand new global technology supply chain and took out Intel/AMD/Nvidia just as US leveraged PC to circumvent Japan's dominance in semiconductor and electronics during the 80s and took down Fujitus/NEC/Toshiba who were too busy building moats.

 

[-Fran-]

One more small step toward China's CPU independence and technology blockades against it becoming useless.

On the upside, it would make X86 and ARMv# ISA's a bit less relevant going forward? 😀

I mean, if China becomes a backer of RISC-V, I can see it having an explosive growth and that will drive innovation for devices produced in China for sure.

Android, since it's Linux at the heart, can be re-compiled for RISC-V I'm sure, or they can just fork it and use a variant they can open-source as well. Davlik, I'm not sure if it has RISC-V support though, but it shouldn't be hard to port it from ARM to it.

I don't even understand what the USA is trying by banning China from using ARM... Is it because most of the military contractors use ARM micro-controllers?

Cheers!

 

[InvalidError]

I don't even understand what the USA is trying by banning China from using ARM... Is it because most of the military contractors use ARM micro-controllers?

It is a combination of a couple of things, the most important ones being Biden continuing most of the trade war it inherited from the POOO, the usual slate of patent disputes and the USA's long-standing feud with Huawei more specifically.

 

[DotNetMaster777]

Open source architecture is always best choice !!

I hope that Huawei is going to build more powerful devices with risc v !?!?!

 

[hotaru.hino]

The irony I'm seeing is if China uses RISC-V to make something powerful enough to be a threat to everyone else, they're not obligated to share it.

Open architecture doesn't imply open implementation.

 

[-Fran-]

The irony I'm seeing is if China uses RISC-V to make something powerful enough to be a threat to everyone else, they're not obligated to share it.

Open architecture doesn't imply open implementation.

Unless it has a military aspect to it, considering the way copyright works in China, they can't keep other Companies from using the designs they come up with (the companies); in their own territory even.

I can't remember exactly how it was in all fairness, but it was interesting.

Regards,

 

[hotaru.hino]

Unless it has a military aspect to it, considering the way copyright works in China, they can't keep other Companies from using the designs they come up with (the companies); in their own territory even.

I can't remember exactly how it was in all fairness, but it was interesting.

I'm not saying that other companies can't find a way to "copy" their designs.

I keep seeing a misunderstanding of what an ISA is. From what I'm seeing, people think that the ISA dictates the design of the processor all the way. And while that is true to an extent, all it really dictates is how the front-end is designed. It's like people praise "ARM processors" being great and using Apple's CPU as the poster child while conveniently forgetting that ARM's own IP cores are still lagging behind.

So while the ISA of RISC-V is open in that there's no royalties required for using the ISA, any implementation of it is necessarily not open. It's like the C standard is open, but apps built with it aren't always open. And I get that RISC-V is exciting in some areas, but it's not going to be the microprocessor savior that people seem to prop it up to be. At least when it's up against ARM and x86. And in fact, I suspect ARM will still be around for a long while because not everyone has the expertise to realize an IP core built around an ISA.

 

[InvalidError]

So while the ISA of RISC-V is open in that there's no royalties required for using the ISA, any implementation of it is necessarily not open.

Although less common, implementations of the ISA can be open-source too. Software emulation and JIT re-compliers are forms of implementation. There are also some HDL implementations including a couple from the RISC-V project contributors themselves for use in FPGAs and system-level simulations in tools like ModelSim that can eventually be turned into ASICs.

 

[-Fran-]

I'm not saying that other companies can't find a way to "copy" their designs.

I keep seeing a misunderstanding of what an ISA is. From what I'm seeing, people think that the ISA dictates the design of the processor all the way. And while that is true to an extent, all it really dictates is how the front-end is designed. It's like people praise "ARM processors" being great and using Apple's CPU as the poster child while conveniently forgetting that ARM's own IP cores are still lagging behind.

So while the ISA of RISC-V is open in that there's no royalties required for using the ISA, any implementation of it is necessarily not open. It's like the C standard is open, but apps built with it aren't always open. And I get that RISC-V is exciting in some areas, but it's not going to be the microprocessor savior that people seem to prop it up to be. At least when it's up against ARM and x86. And in fact, I suspect ARM will still be around for a long while because not everyone has the expertise to realize an IP core built around an ISA.

I don't disagree and I understand what you said.

That is why I'm excited about Huawei openly saying they'll adopt RISC-V, because we'll be able to see how different ISAs stack on a same-ish form factor (phones). Yes, implementation matters, but I'm sure their target will always be either Apple's performance or stock-ARM design performance, or even Exynos'. This will definitely invite other Chinese big players adopt it and experiment with different designs or iterations based off what Huawei can come up with (this is where my comment about copyright law comes from). Maybe other players will pick up RISC-V if it catches up? MediaTek, TI and some other medium-sized players from the USA could? If they haven't already for some low end products.

I also remember there was a company backing RISC-V that was fairly new and trying to put a uArch for it. I can't remember the name of it.

Regards.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Maybe other players will pick up RISC-V if it catches up? MediaTek, TI and some other medium-sized players from the USA could? If they haven't already for some low end products.

My outlook is at best, RISC-V will displace ARM or other custom/little-used ISAs in specialized microcontrollers for products built by larger or long standing companies. NVIDIA has already invested in it, I believe Western Digital or Seagate was looking into it for storage drive controllers. For other smaller companies that use microcontrollers, unless someone comes out with a competitive RISC-V part, they're going to stick with ARM.

As far as displacing current general purpose computers? RISC-V has a very long ways to go.

 

[mobiushorizons]

Overall, the HiSilicon Hi3861 development board has rather vast (at least Raspberry Pi-like) capabilities

This device is much more similar to an esp8266 or maybe esp32 than it is to a Raspberry pi in that it is squarely in the microntroller space instead of embedded processor. To the uninitiated this may seem like a small difference, but it's actually really huge. The main difference is that this device does not have the ability to run a traditional operating system (like linux), but it also has substantially smaller ram, flash, and processor speed. In this way it's much more similar to an Arm Cortex-M4 than it is to a linux capable arm chip (eg cortex-A7 in a raspberry pi zero)

For an example of just how much less capable this chip is, the Hi3861 runs at 160 MHz with 352 KB SRAM and 288 KB ROM, 2 MB flash memory. A Pi zero runs at 1Ghz with 512mb Ram, and boots off an SD card that is typically more than a gigabyte.

This is still significant, but it does not compete with linux capable arm at all.

 

[rugupiruvu]

On gitee, the Chinese github, I've found micropython for hi3561 running harmonyOS, a small real-time kernel, also by Huawei. From github, to operating system, to silicon: all Chinese.