Two years ago, U.S. chip giant Nvidia suddenly reached a deal with Japan's SoftBank to buy Britain's ARM for $40 billion. As soon as the news of Nvidia's acquisition of ARM came out, it instantly shocked the technology community, Apple, Qualcomm, Huawei and other companies have written to relevant departments to request the rejection of the merger, and Chinese academician Ni Guangnan also issued a warning at the first time.
Academician Ni Guangnan said that once NVIDIA successfully acquires ARM, the United States will hold X86 and ARM two architectures, will completely monopolize the chip design architecture market, at that time, Huawei and other Chinese companies are likely to no longer have a chip architecture available, even if it can be used, it will not be so comfortable, we must stop at all costs to prevent the merger and acquisition, and develop an independent and controllable chip architecture.
Chip architecture is the upstream of the semiconductor industry, running through the design, lithography, packaging and testing and other chip manufacturing links, so without the authorization of the architecture manufacturer, chip manufacturing cannot be discussed.
Today, Academician Ni Guangnan's prediction has come true, although Nvidia has abandoned the plan to acquire ARM, but Chinese companies are likely to no longer be comfortable using ARM architecture in the future.
Recently, after winning a patent technology dispute lawsuit with Qualcomm with the United States, ARM suddenly announced a change in the rules to require all companies in the world that use ARM architecture not to use third-party GPUs, NPUs or ISPs in Soc chips after 2024.
Apple, Huawei, Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek and other giants use ARM architecture, but in order to imprint their own attributes on chip products, in the process of designing chips, they do not use ARM's GPU, NPU or ISP technology.
Nowadays, with the showdown of ARM, the chips designed by giants such as Apple, Huawei, Qualcomm, Samsung, and MediaTek will no longer have a big "difference", and if they want to keep the chip unchanged, these companies must find "alternatives"!
ARM has always claimed that the ARM architecture is a "fair and open" architecture, but with the help of major semiconductor companies, the ARM architecture has become a "giant", but with the emergence of the "choice of two" situation, it indicates that ARM companies are no longer disguised, leaking the true face of "capitalists".
ARM's revision of the rules this time has made it difficult for giants such as Apple, Qualcomm and Samsung to ride the tiger, but it has little impact on Chinese companies such as Huawei.
Before the Huawei chip incident occurred, Academician Ni Guangnan began to call on domestic enterprises to rely on the ARM architecture and create an independent and controllable chip architecture. Fortunately, domestic companies have adopted the advice of Academician Ni Guangnan and began to design chips based on the open source RISC-V architecture a few years ago, and have achieved good results, such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Huawei, Alibaba, UNISOC Zhanrui have released a number of chips based on RISC-V architecture, and the performance is not weaker than the "ARM architecture chip", and even achieved a leading position in some aspects.
It is worth mentioning that although the RISC-V architecture is open source, its ownership belongs to us implicitly, because 11 of RISC-V's 14 senior members are Chinese companies, and if overseas companies such as Qualcomm and Apple want to use RISC-V architecture, they are likely to use our RISC-V architecture ecology, at that time, it is likely that a lot of "interesting" things will happen.
In the past ten years, there have been people who have been holding grievances for Academician Ni Guangnan, believing that if Academician Ni Guangnan, who insists on chip autonomy, is not excluded by someone, "China Chip" will not lose the golden development period of twenty years, facts have proved that Academician Ni Guangnan's talent has been buried because of someone, if that person can stand a little higher and seek less personal interests for himself, Huawei and other Chinese companies are likely not to encounter the bad thing of chips being stuck in the neck today!