Looking at the list of RISC-V members, we find traditional chip giants such as Huawei, Intel, Qualcomm, MTK and Nvidia, and we even find analog leaders such as ADI, Infineon, CoreTech, ST, Renesas and NXP in the list. However, as an important part of the chip industry, we do not find Apple in it.

But as mentioned above, their recent architect recruitment gave away their "secret". According to Apple, the company is looking for a proactive system architect to define a compute acceleration strategy for the product.

Apple says you must have a strong understanding of computer architectures (CPU, GPU, neural processing), system/SoC level power architectures, emerging compute engines RISC-V, and low power neural processing architectures. You will map system-level use cases to SoCs and systems, and identify HW/SW partitioning opportunities.

"With this knowledge, you can apply it to analyze the requirements tradeoffs that impact system performance and product experience. The work will focus on use-case level analysis and development of system level models for power, performance and latency to drive the overall product architecture. This cross-functional role requires excellent interpersonal skills, working collaboratively with Camera Module, Architecture, and System EE. Specific requirements for the job are shown below.

From this job description, it appears that Apple is hiring for a position that is more likely to apply RISC-V to low-power or accelerated computing, which is in line with many vendors.

As a company with an extensive product line, Apple is proud of its A-series chips for cell phones, in addition to the M-series chips that have become so popular in recent years. In addition, the H series chips for headphones and the U series chips for UWB are also well-known products of Apple. As we can see from previous reports from Semiconductor Industry Insight, Apple is also planning more WiFi and Bluetooth chips, which have been invaded by RISC-V in a big way, and I believe this is also the primary focus of Apple's RISC-V.

Of course, as Dylan Patel said, the co-processor in the big chip will also be Apple RISC-V can be applied to another direction. This has also been practiced on giants such as Nvidia and Intel. Recently, AMD also revealed the company's views on RISC-V in its latest product release as well.

According to anandtech, on the newly released Alveo MA35D, AMD is moving the management processor in its ASIC VPU built on a 4nm process from Arm to RISC-V. According to anandtech, on the previous generation U30, this processor was using a quad-core Cortex-A53 core, but by the The MA35D's VPU uses a pair of quad-core RISC-V cores. "The RISC-V architecture has been quietly introducing Arm for such management controllers, and this is another example of that shift." anandtech emphasizes. This is, in fact, one of the options for landing RISC-V.

If these overseas giants chose RISC-V to get leverage to negotiate with Arm, or to give the company an additional option. Then, the RISC-V vendors in mainland China are more like desperate bets. Or rather, they are placing a heavy bet on RISC-V.

Arm has become the meat and potatoes in the mobile, PC, embedded and edge markets. This has a lot to do with the fact that Arm has spent a lot of money over the past decade or so to build a solid ecosystem, which is also trending towards the adoption of this lean instruction set architecture in many areas. However, the US-China relationship in recent years has put Arm in a somewhat arcane position, which has contributed to the booming growth of the vaunted open source RISC-V architecture in China.

According to RISC-V International's website, 13 of the 22 top RISC-V international members are from China, including vendors such as the Beijing Open Source Chip Institute, Ali Cloud, Tencent, Sims Computing, and ZTE. Looking at the participating vendors at each level of RISC-V International, we see a number of Chinese vendors.

It seems that the primary task of these vendors is to get a share of the embedded market with the help of RISC-V, as this is the most favored RISC-V landing scenario, which is the reason for the rapid development of domestic RISC-V-based MCUs and vertical applications. At the same time, domestic manufacturers also want to push RISC-V to edge computing and even servers and other high-end chips to find more opportunities.

In addition, according to semiconductor industry observation, some domestic traditional chip giants even abandoned the former commonly used processor architecture, to more open RISC-V, such as Lexin and Junzheng is a typical representative of them.

First look at Lexin, in the past, they used Tensilica processing in most of their chips, but now they have developed their own RISC-V cores and plan to move to RISC-V across the board to develop products that better meet demand. For example, in its latest ESP32 wireless microcontroller, Lexin is using RISC-V cores. The shift was confirmed earlier in a report by Lexin CEO and President Ryan Zhang, who said the company will focus on parts built around the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture. When asked on LinkedIn, Zhang made it clear that RISC-V is the way forward for the company.

Beijing Junzheng, once a very important MIPS buyer in China, is also moving to RISC-V by developing its own cores.

Junzheng said in the past four or five years, the company has been focusing on RISC-V research and development, there are some products have used the company's own RISC-V cores to do real-time processing. At the same time, the company has developed large cores for RISC-V against the ARM53 and ARM55 series, and is currently developing cores against ARM mid- to high-end.

"Our future products will move from the current MIPS architecture cores to RISC-V cores, and we can do a good job of supporting AI engines in the development of cores, which will help our competitiveness in the AIOT product line in the next step." Beijing Junzheng stressed.

Outside of mainland China, RISC-V is also blossoming around the world. For example, in Taiwan, China, has the top IP suppliers; in the United States, not to mention, in addition to high-performance IP suppliers, there are risc-v-based chiplet design, to help build high-performance computing chips.

The list goes on and on. Industry sources believe that those applications that do not require much ecological support (stopping at Linux), RISC-V will explode with great power.

For RISC-V, the one advantage they still have now is that their strongest competitor, Arm, is digging its own grave.

On the one hand, according to the Financial Times at the end of March, Arm is looking to raise the price of its chip designs, and is also pushing more aggressively for price increases in its existing royalty and license sales models, as well as shifting its former royalties from being previously associated with chip pricing to being comparable to whole phones.