In recent years, RISC-V has attracted more and more attention from all parties. On the one hand, as the world situation changes, countries are actively developing self-developed processors. On the other hand, Nvidia’s acquisition of ARM has caused many semiconductor companies to be worried and worried that ARM will eventually be closed. The RISC-V open-source instruction set architecture, which is similar to the ARM architecture, has naturally been sought after. Many companies have tried to develop RISC-V architecture processors. For example, Seagate uses RISC-V processors as the main control chip in many of its hard drives. With the gradual decline of MIPS, RISC-V may become the third force outside of x86 and ARM in the next few years.
According to
Vedomosti.ru, the Russian state-owned enterprise group Rostec has reached an agreement with server company Yadro and chip design company Syntacore, and the three parties will cooperate in the development of RISC-V processors. By 2025, Syntacore will develop a RISC-V processor that meets the demand to serve government, medical, and educational institutions.
It is understood that the cost of the RISC-V processor project is approximately 30 billion rubles (approximately $400 million), of which two-thirds comes from the self-financing of the enterprise, and the remaining one-third comes from the budget of the Russian Federation government. The project plans to sell 60,000 RISC-V processor-based systems. The current design goal is an 8-core processor with a frequency of 2 GHz and a 12nm process manufacturing. As for whether Syntacore chooses to use the RISC-V open-source instruction set architecture to develop its own core, or to buy an authorized design, this is not yet confirmed.
At present, Russia has a number of self-developed processor plans, such as the Elbrus 2000 series processors using the VLIW instruction set, which can perform binary conversion with x86 instructions, and Rostec is also involved. Compared with Elbrus processors focusing on servers and high-performance desktops, this time RISC-V processors seem to be more inclined to laptops and low-power desktops.
