The chip is the cornerstone of the entire electronic information industry. At present, the global semiconductor market size of 320 billion US dollars, 54% of the world's chips are exported to China, but the market share of domestic chips accounted for only 10%. China's chip industry consumes more than $200 billion in foreign exchange annually, more than oil and commodities, accounting for a considerable proportion of imports.

CPU, as the "heart" of the chip, can be described as the "heart of the core", and the domestic industrial strength has been relatively weak in this regard. The realization of domestic autonomy of CPU is crucial to China's development, but the mainstream instruction set architecture of CPU (such as x86 and ARM) has been monopolized by foreign companies, and domestic companies need to pay high patent fees and be subject to others. As a special chip, CPU requires that the instruction set architecture has universal universality and can share the ecosystem, so it is not practical to invent a closed instruction set within the scope of a country, and must take the road of integrating with the world's mainstream architecture. In this context, the open RISC-V architecture has brought huge strategic opportunities to the development of China's CPU chip industry, and there is hope to completely realize the domestic independence of CPU and architecture mainstream.

At present, China is in a critical period of vigorously developing the chip design industry, to achieve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation requires the majority of scientific research and engineering workers tireless efforts and hard work, need a lot of realistic and pragmatic technical backbone force like the author to shoulder the heavy responsibility of domestic chip revitalization. The shortage of talent in the domestic CPU field is the main factor that restricts the development of the industry for a long time, the author of "hand to hand teach you to design CPU" as a senior CPU design expert who has worked in the front line for a long time, wrote his experience into a book, the information is informative and the text is vivid. With the Hummingbird E200 series processor core developed by the author's company as an example, it is very suitable for teaching fields and enthusiasts to learn, and has a very positive significance for the popularization of CPU design technology.

The emerging RISC-V architecture has set off a boom around the world, and has attracted widespread attention in China, but because there is no good Chinese popular books, many people are still "only hearing its sound, not seeing its shape" for RISC-V. As one of the first domestic technical experts to contact RISC-V architecture and successfully develop RISC-V processor, the author open-source his self-developed processor core in his spare time and wrote a book to explain its implementation details in detail, which reflects the author's high professional level and strong feelings to promote the development of domestic CPU industry.

ISA please carry the pot - why domestic cpus have not been successful enough

As we all know, the chip is the core field of the development of China's information industry, and the CPU represents the core technology in the chip. In this respect, there is an obvious gap between our country and the developed countries. Although after years of efforts, the technology gap has been significantly reduced, but in the civilian commercial field, there is still not too much domestic CPU figure. What are the reasons for the fact that domestic commercial cpus are not yet successful enough? Next, we will take a look at the domestic independent development of CPU companies and the status quo, and their choice of instruction set schools. By analyzing its past and present situation one by one, I believe readers can get answers.

MIPS system - Longson and Junzheng

The emerging RISC-V architecture has set off a boom around the world, and has attracted widespread attention in China, but because there is no good Chinese popular books, many people are still "only hearing its sound, not seeing its shape" for RISC-V. As one of the first domestic technical experts to contact RISC-V architecture and successfully develop RISC-V processor, the author open-source his self-developed processor core in his spare time and wrote a book to explain its implementation details in detail, which reflects the author's high professional level and strong feelings to promote the development of domestic CPU industry.

one Loongson

The Loongson CPU was developed by the Loongson research Group of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and was developed by Beijing Shenzhou Loongson Integrated Circuit Design Company authorized by the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The following is the relevant introduction of the Loongson CPU chip.

The Loongson 1 has a frequency of 266MHz and was first used in 2002, as shown in Figure 1-3. The Loongson 2 has a maximum frequency of 1GHz. Loongson 3A series is a domestic commercial 4-core processor. The latest Loongson 3A3000 is based on the SMIC 28nm FDSOI process and is designed to be 4-core 64-bit with a main frequency of 1.5GHz and power consumption of only 30W, which is ideal for notebook platforms. Loongson 3B series is a domestic commercial 8-core processor with a main frequency of more than 1GHz, accelerated support vector operation, and a peak computing capacity of 128GFLOPS, with a high performance-to-power ratio. Loongson 3B series is mainly used in high-performance computers, high-performance servers, digital signal processing and other fields.

2. Jun Zheng

The domestic MIPS department has another company - Beijing Junzheng. Junzheng and Longson belong to the MIPS camp, different from Longson's focus on desktop PC processors, Beijing Junzheng is one of the earliest domestic IC design companies focused on wearable and Internet of Things. Because the embedded chip software is generally customized according to demand. As a result, in the smart wearable market, a considerable number of wearable products and application software are specific, the software ecological chain is relatively short, coupled with the diversity of application needs, so it is not possible to use a set of universal solutions to meet the requirements of all people, so no manufacturer in this field can achieve monopoly. Therefore, the smart wear market is not easy to appear in the PC and mobile phone market as the x86 and ARM architecture monopoly situation.

Smart wear chip and Internet of Things chip performance requirements are not high, most of the application scenarios are more concerned about low power consumption, cheap and size and other factors, Jun positive products fully meet the performance requirements, x86 processors can not be applied in this field, ARM camp IC design company is subject to relatively high licensing fees, in the case of small chip production, does not have the price competitiveness. Junzheng has more than 10 years of chip design experience and technology accumulation, and its biggest feature is that it has a high performance-power ratio. The first batch of smartwatches listed in China, including the first generation of Guokan smartwatches, Toman generation, Toman second generation smartwatches, etc., have adopted the Juncheng scheme.

x86 series - North public Records, Zhaoxin and Haiguang

one Northern public records

Beijing Beidazhi Microsystem Technology Co., LTD., established in November 2002, is an important backbone enterprise in the national integrated circuit design industry. In 2005, AMD reached an agreement with the Chinese government, and the Ministry of Science and Technology designated the Peking University Microelectronics Center to receive technical licenses for AMD Geode-2 processors, and AMD's processors are undoubtedly x86 architecture, so China has obtained x86 technology. However, the Geode processor belongs to AMD embedded processors, so the x86 technology that AMD licenses to Peking University belongs to the embedded architecture.

2. megacycle

Another domestic enterprise that uses the x86 architecture, Zhaocore, may be more well-known. As we all know, the core x86 architecture is the core technology of Intel and AMD, and the U.S. government will tightly control the licensing of their technology. However, in addition to Intel and AMD, another Taiwanese company, VIA, also once owned the x86 architecture license. It is said that as shown in Figure 1-8, the ZX-C processor independently developed by Zhaoxin was mass-produced in April 2015, 28nm process, 4-core processor, the main frequency can reach 2.0GHz, and supports national secret algorithm encryption. In 2017, Mega Core announced that its latest generation of ZX-D series 4-core and 8-core general-purpose processors had been successfully shipped, and revealed that it would launch the 16nm ZX-E 8-core CPU in 2018.

3. Sea light

In addition to Shanghai Zhaoxin, there is a new company born soon - Tianjin Haiguang. In 2016, AMD announced that it had reached an agreement with China's Tianjin Haiguang Investment Company to license x86 technology to Haiguang for a license fee, and that the two sides would also form a joint venture to license the production of server processors. It is said that in order to open up the Chinese high-performance server market, the x86 that AMD has licensed to the Chinese company is likely to be the most cutting-edge x86 technology. For the performance of the sea light, it is also worth waiting and seeing.

Power system -- Zhongsheng Hongxin

Big Blue IBM's Power architecture has always been the face of high performance. IBM joined with NVIDIA and other companies in 2013 to form the OpenPower Open Alliance, and other companies can also license the Power architecture. Since then, it has also promoted the establishment of the China POWER Technology Industry Ecological Alliance, and signed licensing agreements with a number of Chinese companies, including Zhongsheng Hongxin. Zhongsheng Hongxin was founded in 2013, I believe that Hongxin can realize the digestion and absorption of technology and bring forth the old in a few years.

Alpha Department -- Sunway

Sunway processor or Sunway CPU, referred to as "SW processor".

Sunway continues to deepen and upgrade the independent Alpha architecture, expanding the multi-core architecture and SIMD and other features of the extended instruction set based on dual-core Alpha, mainly for high-performance computing, server fields, in the 2016 International Supercomputing Conference evaluation, The Sunway Taihulight supercomputer system (shown in Figure 1-9), based on the Sunway 26010 processor, debuted and won the title, with a peak performance of 12.5× 10.8 billion floating-point operations per second, becoming the world's first supercomputer to run faster than 10.9 billion times.

ARM - Feiteng, Huawei hisilicon, Spreadtrum and Huaxintong

To better understand the content of this section, it is necessary to introduce ARM's authorization model. In short, ARM's main licensing model can be divided into two types.

License "ARM Processor IP" to other chip manufacturers (partners), who directly use ARM processor IP to design SoC chips. License the "ARM architecture" to other chip manufacturers (partners), who develop their own processor cores based on the ARM architecture, and then use the self-developed processor cores to design SoC chips.

one soar

Feiteng is an enterprise established by the high-performance processor research team of China National University of Defense Technology, which has accumulated strong technical strength in the CPU field for many years. In 2016, Tianjin Feiteng announced the latest product FT2000, which first appeared in the HotChips conference in 2015, code-named "Mars", positioning in high-performance servers, industry business hosts, etc. The FT2000 uses the ARMv8 instruction set, but uses a self-developed kernel, unlike the commercially available ARMv8 Cortex-A53\A57\A72 (purchased directly from ARM).

The FT2000 is also notable for its performance, including up to 64 FTC661 processor cores, and its published Spec 2006 test scores of integer 672 and floating point 585, which is comparable to the Xeon E5-2699v3. This is also the first time that the domestic server chip has matched Intel in performance, and the total aggregate bandwidth of the memory control chip is 204.8GB/s, more than the current E5V3 and E7V3, and close to the IBM POWER8 (230GB/s). The fact that the running score is comparable to Intel's Xeon E5-2699v3 means that the Fly 2000 is more than adequate for many commercial applications, and it can replace some Intel products in the commercial market as long as the software ecosystem keeps up.

2. Huawei hisilicon

Huawei hisilicon is currently one of the most technologically powerful chip developers in China. Huawei's Kirin chip is on a par with leading chip companies like Qualcomm and Samsung in terms of performance. At the same time, Huawei is currently one of the four major domestic server providers, Huawei, Lenovo, Inspur and other domestic server companies occupy the share of China's server market has exceeded 65%. Huawei bought the ARM instruction set architecture license a few years ago and began to develop its own processor core, focusing on the server market.

At the "12th Five-Year" Technology Innovation Achievement Exhibition, Huawei exhibited its first ARM platform server "Taishan", equipped with self-developed ARM architecture 64-bit processor "Hi1612", using TSMC 16nm process, with up to 16 cores, compatible with ARMv8-A instruction set. With Huawei's strong research and development strength and market operation ability, it is believed that it will have a good performance.

3. Spreadtrum

In addition to Huawei, Spreadtrum is another domestic mobile phone chip leader. In 2016, Spreadtrum's chip shipments reached 67 million sets, and in June 2017 announced the successful development of its own ARM architecture processor, Spreadtrum claimed that the SC9850 4-core (Cortex-A7) chip has achieved a 6-core design in the same area, power consumption and performance can be configured according to their own needs. It marks that Spreadtrum has become the second mobile phone chip manufacturer with independent ARM CPU key technology after Qualcomm, in addition to Apple and Samsung's two smartphone manufacturers (Samsung and Apple's independent chips are mainly for their own use).

4. Huaxintong

In 2016, Qualcomm and the Guizhou government of China established a joint venture chip company in China, Huaxintong Semiconductor, which aims to design and develop server chips specifically for the Chinese market. Huaxintong has licensed the ARM v8-A architecture, and said that China has become the world's second largest data center market, and the license will help Huaxintong Semiconductor to introduce advanced server chipset technology in the rapidly expanding Chinese server market, and help Chinese enterprises to provide ARM-based server technology in the local market, thereby promoting the large-scale deployment of efficient server solutions.

ISA, the blame man

From the above chapters, we have learned about the heroes of domestic CPU design. However, as mentioned above, at present in the civil commercial field, there is still not too much domestic CPU figure. It can be said that the main reason why domestic processors have not been successful enough in the civilian commercial field is ISA, and this pot ISA must be backed.

This paper discusses the importance of instruction set architecture (ISA) for CPU, so for a CPU, the absolute hardware technology level is not the most important.

At present, the commercial mainstream instruction set architecture in different fields has emerged a clear dominant pattern.

The x86 architecture dominates the desktop PC and server worlds. ARM architecture dominates the mobile handset space, while making inroads into desktop PCS and servers. ARM has an absolute advantage in the embedded space.

Therefore, the author has always believed that only commercial companies attached to the x86 and ARM camp can truly achieve full commercialization. I believe this is why most of the heroes of domestic CPU design in recent years are x86 or ARM.

However, domestic autonomy is vital to China's national economy and people's livelihood, and the pursuit of domestic autonomy is safe and controllable is the strategic direction that China must adhere to. From this point of view, the choice of x86 or ARM architecture ultimately has its limitations, as discussed below.

1. x86 architecture

Since Intel and AMD are themselves chip companies rather than intellectual property (IP) companies, the x86 architecture is their lifeblood, assuming that other licensed chip companies use x86 architecture to produce chips that pose a substantial threat to Intel and AMD