RISC-V – Ready for the Prime Time now?
Technology has made our lives easier than ever. In the past, people needed “magic” to speed up their endeavors but now we only need to press some buttons and there you go, you can do almost everything using your fingertips in seconds but things and tools which help us spend an easy life took years of hard work to function the way they are now. It’s a work of decades. There is no doubt that technology has improved our lives over the past few decades. It altered everything.
As days are running faster, we keep seeing modifications in every small invention. Everything is diversified day by day. Internet’s been buzzing with discussions about RISC-V, the popular new kid on the microprocessor block.
RISC-V is becoming popular day by day and many companies have flocked to support RISC-V instead of other ISAs. It wasn’t the same in the not-so-distant past.
The RISC-V instruction set first started in May 2010 under the instructions of Prof. David Patterson who was the director of this project. This project didn’t have federal funding, but other sources were generous.
What is RISC-V and why is this ISA getting popular among every tech person or developer even if it doesn’t involve Zero new technology? Let’s have a look.
RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) stands for ‘reduced instruction set (ISA) computer (RISC) five’ is a fifth edition of the RISC ISA designs from UC Berkeley and is an open-source standard instruction set architecture that allows smaller device manufacturers to manufacture hardware without paying a huge amount as a royalty. If you want to use any ISA like ARM for example, you have to pay a huge amount to use it. Most small companies cannot afford the payment so here the RISC-V comes with all benefits.
RISC-V was proposed as an alternative to commercial architectures and is freely available to academia and industry. The public domain is making RISC-V popular worldwide but that’s not all there is to it. It also provides you with freedom to evolve the basic architecture into more advanced superscalar designs with multiple cores.
RISC-V is sufficient for all computing purposes. It is revolutionary because you can port your software, processors can be built, hardware can be developed and it’s free with freedom. Anyone can develop their hardware and run their software while using RISC-V.
Is RISC-V Better than ARM And X86?
Everyone knows that ISA is the fundamental component of any CPU, and the most commonly known ISAs are ARM and X86 but why did 36 companies come together to support RISC-V and founded the RISC-V foundation? The original developers of RISC-V transferred their rights to the foundation to help the world.
Within a few years, the foundation Successfully gathered more than 2000 members all around the world. There are some well-known members from across the world such as Google, Hitachi, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Western Digital.
The basic difference between ARM, and RISC-V is the business model and computing architectures. These are based on proprietary IP, and the companies sell licenses. As you know RISC-V is free of cost and there are no license fees. It helps developers and creators grow faster and easier also, RISC-V and ARM processors are established on RISC notions in terms of computing architectures, while x86 processors from Intel and AMD employ CISC designs.
RISC-V has simple instructions, developers can complete the task with simple instructions.
RISC-V has been used for several great projects as it helps to reduce the tax cost and it also provides security and safety to build trusted implementations at low cost. The US army has been using RISC-V to develop software at a low cost.
The United States of America produces Chips and ships them all over the world including Russia.
The U.S has been shipping technological goods to Russia for decades or maybe centuries but now it has been restricted by sanctions due to Ukraine and Russian war.
The U.S has changed its policies and only a special permit from the US government allows it to ship processors and GPUs from the US companies Nvidia and AMD.
Many other companies are implementing the same rules while shipping telecommunications equipment, lasers, sensors, and navigation systems.
Even the U.S government said, “We will choke off Russia’s access to finance and technology and weaken its industrial capability for years to come,” told US President Joe Biden. You will cut off the opponent “from more than half of its high-tech imports”.
But there are reports that Russia plans to build RISC-V-based CPUs by 2025. There is also a Russian company that produces second-generation chips.
RISC-V Characteristics.
Even though RISC-V is free of cost, it comes with so many amazing characteristics. Some of them are listed below.
1: RISC-V is a proven ISA and obeys established RISC design principles.
2: It has a load-store architecture.
3: It allows software and hardware freedom in architecture.
4: RISC-V is supported by several language compilers.
5: RISC-V is flexible and scalable.
6: It comes with artificial intelligence.
7: Automotive
8: Cloud servers
9: General Purpose Processors
10: Virtual Reality
11: Machine Learning
12: Augmented Reality