Ecological development of open-source hardware RISC-V
While open-source software is sweeping the world, the open-source hardware is also steadily developing, and RISC-V is currently the most popular project. Calista Redmond, CEO of the RISC-V Foundation, recently shared some of the ecological developments of RISC-V.
Compared with other instruction sets, the open-source instruction-set RISC-V can be freely used for any purpose, allowing anyone to design, manufacture and sell RISC-V chips and software. Because of these characteristics, it has successively attracted IBM, NXP, Western Digital, Nvidia, more than 100 technology companies, including Qualcomm, Samsung, Google, Huawei, Ali, Red Hat, and Tesla, have joined its camp, and the industry is constantly building an ecosystem around it, which has caused a huge impact on competitors such as ARM
RISC-V foundation [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
According to Calista, a wide range of RISC-V projects have been launched, including projects for wearable health monitors and chips used to expand cloud data centers at the University of Bologna, Italy, and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain. For example, a specific use case of RISC-V is autonomous vehicles.
In his speech, Calista pointed out that RISC-V has a proprietary architecture that may be difficult to implement, that is, it is a processor design that requires customization, and order chip giants such as Intel and AMD may have difficulty adapting. She noted that cloud providers such as Amazon, Google, and Alibaba have been designing their own chips, while Western Digital and NVIDIA have been providing RISC-V microcontrollers in their products for years.
“By having a modular, simple design, you can technically innovate and disrupt in many different industries, across a wide spectrum of applications,” she said. “By having an open and free business model, you can bring down costs, and you can collaborate for the development of the workload you’re wishing to serve.”
