Tencent joins RISC-V Foundation

CTOnews.com news on December 21, Tencent Technology has joined RISC-V International and ranks among Premier Members. In this level, there are also Ali Yun, Beijing Open Source Chip Research Institute, Cheng Capital, Haihe Lab, Huawei, ZTE, Sai Fang, Xim Computing and Zhan Rui.

Alibaba and Tencent aim to create new intellectual property rights for chips based on open source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA). This means that these vendors may be looking to develop core designs and other silicon components as the basis for future chips.

RISC-V is considered a safer option than proprietary Arm ISA. After all, Arm is a British company, and its owner, Softbank Corp., wants to list it on an American stock exchange.

Prior to this, teams such as Beijing Open Source Chip Research Institute have developed a "Xiangshan" high-performance RISC-V chip, which is designed to compete with Arm technology.

CTOnews.com learned that RISC-V International is a non-profit organization that manages the open standard RISC-V instruction set Architecture (ISA), relevant specifications, and communities of interested parties. RISC-V members now have more than 3180 members in 70 countries, working together to contribute to RISC-V open specification development and to convene and manage relevant technical, industry, domain and alliance groups. RISC-V combines a modular technical approach with an open, free licensing model so that anyone, anywhere can benefit from the intellectual property contributed and generated by RISC-V. RISC-V enables communities to jointly invest in technology, drive future strategic development, create more quickly, enjoy unprecedented design freedom, and greatly reduce the cost of innovation.