Recently, the official revealed the AI ​​chip plan of Dharma Hospital. Yesterday, officials announced that they had purchased a domestic chip company, Hangzhou Zhongtian Microsystems Co., Ltd. Is it strange to this name? In fact, even if you typed the name into the search engine yesterday, the final result was only an old news of "shipping 500 million chips" last year, as well as a "concise" official website.
Mysterious Sky Micro, Mysterious IPCore
According to the self-introduction of the Zhongtian Micro official website, this company, established in 2001, is an integrated circuit design company that is committed to "32-bit high-performance, low-power embedded CPU and core architecture licensing." Its most important product is the "international advanced level" of the embedded "CK-CPU", which uses the 32-bit C-SKY series embedded CPU core also has independent intellectual property rights.
Let's take a look at the product again. Take the most powerful CK810 from Zhongtian Micro for example. The main features include: Reduced instruction architecture, 32-bit data, 16/32-bit variable-length instructions, and unit performance of 2.5 DMIPS/MHz. At the same time, the official also gave the overall chip parameter performance under the 65nm, 40nm process.
Tiger sniffed at the specific circumstances of the Zhongtian microchip, but also issued several questions to Alibaba. However, officials all said that they cannot respond to the corresponding technical problems in a timely manner.
In addition to its own use, Zhongtian Micro will also authorize its own CPUIP (independent intellectual property rights). The currently known cooperation includes the domestic chip startup company Shenjian Technology.
After reading such a large section of technical introduction, is it not clear that it is not clear? Listen to the tiger and sniff it out for you.
The first thing that must be clarified is that Zenith Micro's "CK-CPU" belongs to the RISC (Reduced Instruction Set) architecture, and similarly positioned products include ARM, MIPS, and other architectures. The most used ARM architecture on mobile phones should be very familiar to everyone, and MIPS actually has a lot of "fate" with China - Godson is technically derived from the MIPS architecture.
In recent years, the development track of ARM Cortexcore
According to data disclosed by Zhongtian Micro-Official and related data from Wikipedia, Zhongtian Micro currently has the highest-end CK810, which has actually matched the performance of the ARM Cortex-A9 (both have a single core unit performance of 2.5 DMIPS/MHz). The Cortex-A9 architecture is a product released by ARM in 2007.
In contrast, the Cortex-A73 architecture announced by ARM in 2016 has a single-core unit performance of 4.8 DMIPS/MHz.
In other words, Zenith Micro's "CK-CPU" is a relatively biased mobile and embedded CPU. Compared with the same type of ARM processor, the technology gap is approximately 11 years.
Another point worth mentioning is that from the corresponding introduction of Zhongtian Micro's official website, we can learn that its CK610 is the second generation product and CK810 is the third generation product. In terms of unit performance, the latter has increased by 37% over the former. It can be seen that in the development of the corresponding product technology, Zhongtian Micro has made progress. What's more, RISC architecture processors can also compensate for the lack of performance of a single core, such as the number of stacks.
Therefore, if we look at the issue of “problemsâ€, the RISC processors used in various mobile and networking devices are indeed an indispensable core hardware resource in China. After all, the 11-year technological gap is certainly stronger than none (the above analysis is based on the official information of Zhongtian Micro, and the conclusion is only for reference).
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Although Zhongtianwei was acquired by Alibaba today, the cooperation between the two parties has already begun. As early as 2015, the two parties have already developed the (YunonChip) architecture for various segments of the Internet of Things. Contacting the previous ultra-professional transit micro-manufacturers 70, SoC chip cumulative shipments exceeded 500 million pieces of information, Alibaba is very likely in their own Internet of things products have been applied to the micro-chip.
The tiger sniffed that he asked about Alibaba.com if the current microchip was already in use. The other party said that he needed to know more about the situation before he could reply.
However, from the perspective of subsequent cooperation, Alibaba should be quite satisfied with the strength of Zhongtian Micro. In January 2016 and June 2017, they respectively invested in 500 million yuan to Zhongtianwei.
In terms of specific results, there are also three cloud chips based on the AliOS software and hardware framework, including a new computer vision disk, an MCU platform chip, and an extremely low-power NB-IoT IoT security chip based on AliOS.
Zhongtian Micro-Chief CEO Qi Xiaoning also stated directly: "I hope that through Alibaba's powerful platform and data center system, we can realize high-volume commercial applications of our own R&D chips and contribute to the real 'China Core' R&D and mass production. â€
It can be said that even if it is not acquired today, the cooperation between Zhongtian Micro and Alibaba is already very close.
Naught up semiconductors, need to fight for all possible breakthroughs
Strictly speaking, the RISC architecture is only one of the many processor architectures in the world, and it is not the largest and the strongest in the general processor classification. However, we must not underestimate the breakthroughs caused by continued investment in development and the possibility of victory behind the breakthrough.
According to an “optimistic†market expectation released by ARM in 2015, the ARM processor’s overall market size in 2020 is expected to reach US$151 billion.
If we can find a corresponding opportunity in this huge market, and thus create an independent upstream RISC processor industry that belongs to China, it can also be regarded as the outstanding achievement of the entire Chinese semiconductor industry.
Of course, how to focus on eliminating the technology gap with the world's advanced level for many years and how to apply domestic CPU chips to the equipment of Chinese people's daily life will be the next issue that Zhongtian Weihe Ali needs to think about and solve.
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