SHANGHAI — Asked to name one country where “free,” “open-source” RISC-V should find its natural home, I was pretty sure it ought to be China.

Consider China’s history. Although the government has invested in various CPUs in the past, China never invented a home-grown CPU. Logic dictates, hence, that the Chinese engineering community would jump on RISC-V. Right?

RISC-V Foundation

Not so fast. China does appear to have many “buyers” interested in RISC-V cores, as Rick Merritt reported in Silicon Valley. But as I hunt for “developers” trying to leverage the RISC-V instruction set, I’m coming up short in Shanghai.

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In theory, RISC-V should provide Chinese engineers with a much-needed level playing field. The reality is that China and RISC-V don’t seem to be compatible — at least for now.

Here are five reasons why:

First, most Chinese chip vendors are already invested heavily in Arm and beholden to it. It’s hard to break free from Arm’s stranglehold.

Given Arm’s well-established ecosystem and the fact that it provides the preferred processing core for Android smartphones, why should local companies who design and develop chips for Android phones switch to anything else?

Second, RISC-V isn’t a free core. Yes, RISC-V offers a free and open-source instruction set. But this doesn’t mean that there are a ton of “free cores” lying around if a Chinese company knocks on the door at the RISC-V Foundation.

Third, developing a CPU requires design expertise in several specialties. These include electronic logic, compilers, and operating systems. Chinese designers need first-hand experience with modern, high-quality general-purpose computer instruction sets.

Fourth, RISC-V is designed to create a unified community. In a lot of community efforts, Asian engineers are often more eager to “take” from the community than “contributing” to it. As Wayne Dai, CEO of VeriSilicon observed, “Chinese engineers aren’t used to ‘uploading’ their ideas. They should start from there.”

Fifth, China is a master of fragmentation.

Time and time again, when a standard is set elsewhere in the world, eager Chinese companies — hopeful of carving out their own niche — have created a variant “standard” with a Chinese flavor. Although “derivative” China standards have rarely caught on anywhere, the value of having a uniform foundation to which everyone agrees has yet to crack the great wall of Chinese exceptionalism.

Dai cited an example — he recently encountered in China someone promoting a group called “RISC-F,” not “RISC-V.” He said, “I had to stop and ask, ‘Are you kidding me?’” He said, some Chinese apparently rationalize that if it is “open and free,” they are indeed free to do whatever they want. Wrong again.

RISC-V: Confluence of AI and IoT

Against this backdrop, a new industry group called the China RISC-V Industry Consortium (CRVIC) started in September 2018 and held its first official meeting just last month. The group, headed by Dai, has about 60 membership companies today. The mission is clear, said Dai. “Our focus is on commercialization of RISC-V in China.”

The group hopes to track and share the measurable progress of RISC-V in China — including shipment of commercial RISC-V products, unit numbers, and universities starting courses to teach RISC-V. “We hope to offer RISC-V compliance services as well,” Dai added.

Dai sees the advent of RISC-V as a critical moment, as the global market splinters under the influence of IoT and AI. On one hand, IoT is fragmenting. On another, AI is demanding heterogeneous systems. Many experts agree a traditional computing architecture will struggle to process data efficiently in a variety of domain-specific AI applications.