By hmimcu 
In the past decade, technology has become the main theme of Alibaba’s development, and Alibaba has achieved world-class results in the fields of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and chips. Especially on the long march of chip development, Alibaba has extended from software to hardware and overcome difficulties in core design links. Since its establishment five years ago, Alibaba Pingtou not only has the research and development capabilities of high-performance data center chips, but also has achieved breakthroughs in the underlying processor architecture, becoming one of the leaders in the global open source RISC-V field, giving Chinese companies a say in the wave of AIoT chips.
In the era of PC and mobile internet, Chinese companies have experienced an unforgettable “core acid” past. One of the core reasons for this situation is the blank of processor architecture technology, and the software and hardware ecology of chips has long been monopolized by x86 and ARM. In the PC era, Intel x86 architecture chips have dominated the PC market for decades, with impeccable performance. However, Intel x86 architecture is not externally licensed, and only a few companies worldwide, such as AMD, can use this architecture to develop chips. In the era of mobile internet, ARM has built a huge software and hardware ecosystem with its low-power advantages and a more open authorization mode than the x86 ecosystem. Especially at the chip hardware level, ARM authorizes instruction sets and processor cores to chip design enterprises. Chinese chip companies have taken this opportunity to develop rapidly, but the fact that core technologies are still subject to human control has not changed.
The explosion of the AIoT market has changed the pattern of x86 and ARM being two strong players. At this stage, customized and specialized chips have become a new trend, and the business models of x86 and ARM are far from meeting market demand. In 2010, Professor David Patterson’s team at the University of California, Berkeley led the development of the RISC-V instruction set and announced that it would be open source for any enterprise or developer to use for free; In 2015, RISC-V was operated by the International Foundation, and this technology began to move from universities to the industry.
If ARM has driven the process from a pure closed architecture to a semi open architecture era, then RISC-V has pushed openness to the extreme, and its unique advantages of openness, flexibility, and streamlining perfectly meet the needs of the AIoT market. For chip design manufacturers, this new model also significantly reduces the cycle and cost of chip design. This natural advantage quickly made RISC-V a new darling of the semiconductor industry. According to statistics, RISC-V has more than 3000 members including Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and Google, marking the beginning of the third wave of chip wave.
In this wave, Alibaba is undoubtedly one of the earliest technology companies to layout. In 2015, at the beginning of the trend of internet enterprise chip making, Alibaba announced a collaboration with Zhongtian Micro, the only mainland company with an independent embedded CPU IP core, to develop a cloud chip architecture. This was Alibaba’s first step into the semiconductor field since its establishment in 16 years, and also laid the groundwork for subsequent research and development of RISC-V processors. On the other side of the ocean, Amazon almost simultaneously announced the acquisition of Israeli chip startup Annapurna Labs, and Google launched AI specific chip TPU.
Afterwards, the layout of Alibaba’s chip continued to expand. In October 2017, Alibaba established the Dharma Institute, with chips as one of its core research directions; In April 2018, Alibaba fully acquired Zhongtianwei; In September 2018, the chip research and development team of Damo Academy merged with the Zhongtian Micro team to establish Pingtouge. The new team continues Alibaba’s inclusive mission: on the one hand, it develops chips for Alibaba Cloud data centers and provides inclusive computing power in the cloud; On the other hand, investing in the research and development of RISC-V processor architecture helps chip design companies lower the design threshold for AIoT chips.
This strategy fully utilized the advantages of the two forces of the Pingtou Brother team, and in less than a year, Pingtou Brother submitted his first transcript. In July 2019, Ping Tou Ge released the industry’s most powerful RISC-V processor, the Xuan Iron 910. The Xuantie 910 has broken the ceiling of RISC-V performance, making high-performance chips based on RISC-V architecture possible. This is an important step for Alibaba to build a chip ecosystem and also leading a new trend in the chip industry. Domestic and foreign technology companies and institutions have flocked to the RISC-V track.
In June 2021, the Institute of Computing of the Chinese Academy of Sciences released the high-performance RISC-V processor Xiangshan; In February 2022, Intel announced its membership in the RISC-V camp and became a senior member of the RISC-V Foundation; In November 2022, American chip startup SiFive launched a 3.4GHz RISC-V processor. At the same time, the investment of various governments has pushed the research and development of this technology to a climax: processor related projects funded by the Indian government have begun to move closer to RISC-V, making RISC-V a de facto national instruction set; The Pakistani government has also announced the inclusion of RISC-V as a national preferred architecture; In June 2022, the Russian Ministry of Digital Development announced that it will vigorously support the development of RISC-V processors; In addition, the EU released a report in September 2022 titled ‘Recommendations and Roadmap for Establishing European Sovereignty over Open Source Hardware, Software, and RISC-V Technology’, supporting RISC-V and Open Source Hardware.
But Pingtou Brother, who has the advantage of starting first, not only entered the unmanned zone in RISC-V’s technological breakthrough, but also made unprecedented attempts in ecology, continuously solving the ecological shortage problem of RISC-V in mobile devices, servers, and other markets. In 2020, Pingtou Brother launched the project of compatibility of the black iron 910 processor with Android system, and completed the support of the main technology stacks of Android system, such as Linux kernel, runtime library, Java Virtual Machine, software simulator, compilation tool, etc. in early 2021, making the basic functions of Android system run smoothly for the first time in the world. This achievement has become one of the benchmark events in the history of RISC-V, achieving significant international impact and greatly boosting industry confidence. In 2022, Google and Ping Tou Ge reached a company level Contributor License Agreement (CLA), in which both parties conducted technical cooperation and sharing on Android system support for RISC-V architecture. Ping Tou Ge’s RISC-V porting of Android code was also included in the system source code by the Android AOSP community, marking the first official Android native support for RISC-V architecture.
Of course, the imagination space of RISC-V is not limited to the terminal market, and Ping Tou Ge is actively promoting RISC-V to launch an impact on cloud server scenarios. In August 2022, Pingtouge established a RISC-V architecture joint group with open-source Longlizard communities focused on server operating systems such as Alibaba Cloud and PLCT Laboratory of the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, to promote the development of RISC-V in the fields of cloud computing and data centers, It injected fresh blood into Alibaba Cloud’s “one cloud multi core” strategy. It is worth mentioning that at the first Xuantie RISC-V Ecological Conference, we were able to launch a 64 core Xuantie RISC-V server chip, further expanding RISC-V’s imagination in the field of cloud computing.
In the past 5 years, the hardware, software, and application ecosystem of Pingtou Ge Xuan Tie RISC-V have shown snowballing growth. We have 8 processor products in three major series and continue to adhere to the inclusive strategy, opening up 4 mass-produced black iron RISC-V processors to global developers; On the other hand, software stacks such as tool chains, middleware and components, operating systems, and AI acceleration libraries have been constructed, and full stack technology cooperation has been carried out with chips, basic software, and application partners.
Thanks to the continuous contributions of global enterprises and institutions, the development speed of RISC-V technology and market far exceeds everyone’s expectations. At present, the shipment volume of RISC-V architecture chips has reached a milestone of 10 billion, completing the 30 year development process of traditional architecture in just 12 years. It is predicted that RISC-V architecture chips are expected to exceed 80 billion by 2025. In 2023, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Review selected RISC-V as one of the top ten breakthrough technologies and gave high praise for its potential to change everything in chip design. Ni Guangnan, an academician of the CAE Member, predicted that in the field of CPU, Intel (x86), Arm and RISC-V will be divided into three parts in the future.
Fortunately, Chinese companies have seized this opportunity. Hundreds of companies in China have been following or developing RISC-V instruction sets. Among the 22 senior members of RISC-V, 12 are Chinese enterprises, including Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, ZTE, and others. In terms of standard formulation, with its profound technological accumulation and ecological layout, Pingtouge has led 11 technical directions such as data center, storage management, Android, and security, ranking among the world’s most important and numerous, and has obtained the first certificate of architecture compatibility testing. This also means that Chinese companies represented by Alibaba have more say in the development of RISC-V technology. Throughout the more than 60 years of semiconductor development, Chinese companies have never had such comprehensive and deep participation.