What does the new specification approved by risc-v mean?

On December 2, us time, risc-v International Foundation announced that its members had approved 15 new specifications, including more than 40 extensions under the risc-v instruction set architecture, with emphasis on its vector, scalar encryption and hypervisor specifications. Risc-v International Foundation said that these specifications have created new opportunities for markets such as AI, machine learning, IOT, automobile and data center. What do these specifications mean for risc-v, a still booming architecture?

Vector processing

In the past, vector computing was often only used in weather forecasting and sonar research. Now, with the rise of artificial intelligence, vector computing began to expand to all types of applications and solutions, and even became the main computing method in some voice and visual machine learning reasoning.

Risc-v vector extension brought by risc-v vector specification opens the door to data operation intensive applications. The extension entered the stage of freezing public review in September this year and has finally been approved. Risc-v's Vector expansion has only more than 100 instructions, but with these instructions, developers can quickly deal with complex operations, such as sparse matrix operation, on risc-v architecture processors, and achieve very low latency.

Risc-v vector expansion also includes Zve for embedded devices and MCU, which provides 32 / 64 integer, single precision and double precision floating-point vector operations for risc-v CPU core with low performance, so as to meet the increasing computing power requirements at the edge. In this way, both consumer IOT devices and industrial machine learning applications can benefit from it.

Scalar encryption

Security is an important part of any architecture. From supporting secure encryption standards to preventing vulnerabilities such as spectre and meltdown encountered in x86, risc-v has not relaxed its encryption.

Scalar encryption specification will accelerate small-scale encryption work. These extensions significantly reduce the threshold of safe and efficient accelerated encryption technology in the Internet of things and embedded devices. With the introduction of scalar encryption extension, risc-v is one order of magnitude faster than using standard instructions directly when implementing some standard hash encryption or packet encryption algorithms.

According to mark Himelstein, CTO of risc-v International Foundation, after using scalar encryption expansion, the number of instructions required for 64 bit risc-v to run aes128 encryption algorithm is reduced from 1145 to 78, which not only improves the performance, but also strengthens the prevention of side channel attacks. In addition to the performance and security advantages, the cost of introducing scalar encryption extension is also very low. It does not need to occupy a lot of logic space on the chip like vector processor. Developers can integrate the current mainstream encryption algorithms into the smallest device.

Hypervisor virtualization

Virtualization support is also one of the common requirements today. Virtualization technology has been introduced into both data centers and embedded devices. The virtualization extension of risc-v has been in the draft stage for a long time, and now it has finally been approved. The risc-v community has completed the transplantation of KVM. The KVM in Linux version 5.16 will officially support the hypervisor extension of risc-v. Xen, another large open source virtual machine, announced in March this year that it will consider supporting risc-v virtualization. The sifive p650 processor announced by sifive on the same day also claims to support virtualization.

With its scalability, risc-v has shown unlimited potential as an accelerator. With the support of virtualization technology, risc-v's hardware resources can be utilized to the greatest extent, and more opportunities will be obtained in the machine and network infrastructure of the data center.

In addition to data centers, automotive and industrial control applications have also fully launched virtualization technology, such as hardware isolation between UI and control applications. These are also the two markets where risc-v has little sense of existence. With the support of virtualization technology, it is believed that risc-v can attract more industry players.

Summary

Although risc-v is still a small part of the global isa market, according to the recent report released by the Research Institute, the processor core of risc-v will double in 2022 and 2023. Especially with the addition of these new specifications and new extensions, small start-ups who want to quickly enter the market are more willing to choose this open architecture.

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