The open source RISC-V architecture continues to attract interest among companies and countries looking for alternatives to the popular ARM and x86 models . The main reason behind this type of movement is to have an independent hardware design solution free of paid licenses whose cost can reach the price of the product or reduce the profit margin.
The big drawback with this promising instruction set is that it currently lacks enough muscle to become a solid alternative to rival industry leaders. However, in recent times we have witnessed a series of changes that suggest a more favorable scenario. The last one comes to us from the hand of five technological actors.
RISC-V has increasing support
Qualcomm, Bosch, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor and NXP have joined to jointly invest in a company aimed at driving the development and adoption of RISC-V globally . The group of companies indicates in a press release that it seeks to focus on next-generation hardware. It is, without a doubt, not insignificant news that invites us to be attentive.
This new company, whose name has not yet been released, will be located in Germany. Although the details about the amount of money invested or the start of its operations are still not clear, its partners have been in charge of providing some details that allow us to glimpse more clearly where they are aiming and what their role could be in the growing development of the architecture.
“The company will be a single source to enable compatible products based on RISC-V, provide reference architectures and help establish widely used solutions in the industry,” they explain. In this sense, they point out that they will first focus on open source solutions oriented to the automotive world, to later expand to mobile phones and IoT.
Qualcomm and company don’t seem to want to keep the ball. In fact, they assure that with this movement they also intend to encourage governments and other industry players to bet on RISC-V. The reason for such a call, in the words of the semiconductor company, is to “increase the resilience of the ecosystem”, a need certainly shared by other stakeholders.
It should be noted that this new company will not be in charge of manufacturing future RISC-V chips, but will be in charge of their design and, as we say, promote their adoption. Qualcomm’s role in this story does not go unnoticed as it is in the midst of a legal battle with ARM Holdings , the firm that monetizes the sale of ARM intellectual property (IP).
The parents of the Snapdragon brand spent $1.4 billion on Nuvia and tried to use the IP obtained by this startup to develop their new Qualcomm Oryon chips to rival none other than Apple, Intel and AMD chips in laptops. ARM Holdings wants nothing to do with this and has generally restricted the scope of its licenses.
In any case, while some are scrambling over ARM, RISC-V is getting more momentum. In addition to the recently announced company, China has decided to bet on this architecture in the midst of the trade war with the United States , European data centers could open the door for it and even Android now supports it . What is to come with RISC-V is actually very exciting.
