The Chinese government plans to announce a policy to promote the use of RISC-V, China's chip manufacturing-related research papers are more than twice as many as those in the United States, and national security risks are also pointed out
Reuters reported, citing sources, that 'Chinese government agencies plan to issue policy guidance recommending the use of RISC-V by March 2025.' Research on chip design and manufacturing is actively conducted in China, and the formulation of policy guidance may lead to the emergence of many products that adopt RISC-V.
Exclusive: China to publish policy to boost RISC-V chip use nationwide, sources say | Reuters
The state of global chip research – Emerging Technology Observatory
https://www.eto.tech/blog/state-global-chip-research/
At the time of writing, most CPUs installed in PCs and smartphones use the 'x86' or 'Arm' architecture. However, Intel and AMD have almost exclusive rights to the x86 architecture, making it difficult for other companies to adopt x86. In addition, although the Arm architecture is adopted by a relatively large number of companies, in order to use the Arm architecture, it is necessary to pay a large license fee to Arm, which holds the rights.
On the other hand, RISC-V is developed as open source, and products can be developed freely without paying license fees. For this reason, in China, which is subject to strict export controls from the United States, a technological powerhouse, development of RISC-V-related technologies is actively underway, and in April 2024, it was reported that the US Department of Commerce was investigating the 'risk that China's development of RISC-V-related technologies poses to US national security.'
According to new information obtained by Reuters, eight government agencies, including China's National Internet Information Office, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Science, Technology and Information and Communications, and State Intellectual Property Administration, are preparing guidance recommending the use of RISC-V, which is scheduled to be announced by April 2025. The Chinese government's recommendation for the use of RISC-V is considered part of a policy to reduce dependence on Western countries.
By the way, a survey by the Emerging Technology Observatory on the number of research papers published on chip design and manufacturing between 2018 and 2023 revealed that China published 160,852 papers, more than double the number published by the United States at 71,688.
Research on RISC-V is also being actively conducted outside of China. For example, on February 9, 2025, AheadComputing , a RISC-V development company founded by former Intel architects, announced that it had raised $21.5 million (approximately 3.2 billion yen). Legendary architect Jim Keller is also on AheadComputing's board of directors.
Happy to announce I'm on the board of AheadComputing.
— Jim Keller (@jimkxa) February 25, 2025
Debbie Marr is the CEO, she's great.
We are making the RiscV ecosystem, rich, broad and solid. CPUs, AI, support IP and software.
Open RiscV is where you can innovate. Unconstrained. https://t.co/SKUpOFoQST
In addition, many products that use RISC-V have already appeared, and software development environments for RISC-V have also been established. The microcomputer board 'Raspberry Pi Pico 2', which is easily available in Japan, also has a built-in RISC-V core, making it possible to run applications for RISC-V. The following article explains how to actually run a program that 'blinks an LED' on the RISC-V core.
I tried running and debugging an LED blinker on the RISC-V core of 'Raspberry Pi Pico 2' - GIGAZINE
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in Hardware, Posted by log1o_hf