China May Prove Arm Wrong About RISC-V's Role In the Datacenter

Arm might not think RISC-V is a threat to its newfound foothold in the datacenter, but growing pressure on Chinese chipmaking could ultimately change that, Forrester Research analyst Glenn O'Donnell tells The Register. From the report: Over the past few years the US has piled on export bans and trade restrictions on Chinese chipmakers in an effort to stall the country's semiconductor industry. This has included barring companies with ties to the Chinese military from purchasing x86 processors and AI kit from the likes of Intel, AMD, and Nvidia. "Because the US-China trade war restricts x86 sales to China, Chinese infrastructure vendors and cloud providers need to adapt to remain in business," O'Donnell said. "They initially pivoted to Arm, but trade restrictions exist there too. Chinese players are showing great interest in RISC-V." RISC-V provides China with a shortcut around the laborious prospect of developing their own architecture. "Coming up with a whole new architecture is nearly impossible," O'Donnell said. But "a design based on some architecture is very different from the architecture itself." So it should come as no surprise that the majority of RISC-V members are based in China, according to a report published last year. And the country's government-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences is actively developing open source RISC-V performance processors. Alibaba's T-Head, which is already deploying Arm server processors and smartNICs, is also exploring RISC-V-based platforms. But for now, they're largely limited to edge and IoT appliances. However, O'Donnell emphasizes that there is no technical reason that would prevent someone from developing a server-grade RISC-V chip. "Similar to Arm, many people dismiss RISC-V as underpowered for more demanding applications. They are wrong. Both are architectures, not specific designs. As such, one can design a powerful processor based on either architecture," he said. [...] One of the most attractive things about RISC-V over Softbank-owned Arm is the relatively low cost of building chips based on the tech, especially for highly commoditized use cases like embedded processors, O'Donnell explained. While nowhere as glamorous as something like a server CPU, embedded applications are one of RISC-V's first avenues into the datacenter. [...] These embedded applications are where O'Donnell expects RISC-V will see widespread adoption, including in the datacenter. Whether the open source ISA will rise to the level of Arm or x86 is another matter entirely.

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