In the field of mobile chip architecture, ARM companies are the dominant ones. Chip industry giants including Qualcomm , MediaTek, Samsung are all customers of ARM. Even Huawei HiSilicon Kirin 9000 chip is designed based on ARM architecture. However, since the chip rules were modified, ARM has stopped authorizing the new ARM architecture of Huawei regardless of the principle of neutrality, which also makes Chinese people angry.
You should know that the first step in manufacturing a chip is design, and the chip architecture is the core foundation of chip design. If chip manufacturing is compared to building a house, then the chip architecture is the foundation. If the base is not well laid, it means that the house may collapse at any time. There is no need to say more about its importance.
It is precisely because of this, and ARM is a non-US chip architecture company. Therefore, when Nvidia wanted to acquire ARM, many countries and regions expressed opposition, and the "acquisition" ended with Nvidia giving up.
What people unexpectedly expected is that just recently, the US chip giant Qualcomm broke an important news to the outside world, and this is the situation.
According to Qualcomm's revelations, ARM will plan to restrict major chip manufacturers from adopting self-developed GPU, NPU and other architectures.
That is to say, ARM companies hope to use chip manufacturers based on ARM architecture CPUs. Every step of design on SOC-level chips must be based on ARM architecture, including components such as GPU, NPU and ISP. In the eyes of the outside world, this is the so-called "overlord clause".
As soon as this news came out, it immediately attracted widespread attention from the global technology circle. Once ARM really prohibits customers from using self-developed GPU architectures, chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Samsung will either adopt a full set of ARM architectures or develop their own CPU chips. However, based on the current situation, it is unrealistic to make chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm suddenly develop their own CPU chips.
And the incident of ARM and Qualcomm going to court also proves that Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Ni Guangnan is indeed visionary. Because as early as the 1990s, Academician Ni Guangnan spared no effort to call on the domestic market to develop core IT technologies, especially independent operating systems and domestic CPUs. He always believed that this was related to the issues of information security and the sustainable development of the industry.
The most important thing is that Academician Ni Guangnan also made it clear that if you want to break the patent barrier of the two major chip architectures X86 and ARM, you must focus on developing the open source architecture RISC-V.
According to expert analysis, it is estimated that the global RISC-V shipments will exceed 60 billion by 2025. In other words, RISC-V is fully capable of becoming the third largest CPU architecture after X86 and ARM.
It is fortunate that in recent years, with the joint efforts of a number of scientific research institutions and enterprises including Huawei, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Alibaba , etc., we have also achieved many good results in the RISC-V track. For example, Alibaba Wujian 600 platform, Alibaba Pingtou Ge , the Xiangshan processor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the TV chip developed by Huawei HiSilicon, etc.
It is worth mentioning that among the 19 senior members of the RISC-V International Foundation, 12 are from China, including Huawei, Alibaba, ZTE , Unigroup Zhanrui , etc. In other words, we have absolute voice in the industrial layout of RISC-V.
In addition, in terms of domestic self-development, Loongson Zhongke has also successfully developed the LoongArch architecture through continuous efforts. Although it is just a breakthrough from 0 to 1, it can be pushed at least at critical moments.
No matter what, we must always believe that there is no shortcut to breaking the road to domestic chips. Only by mastering key core technologies can we not be controlled by others. As for how the "farce" of ARM and Qualcomm ends, let's wait and see. What do you think about this? Everyone is welcome to leave a message, like and share.
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