Why is RISC-V significant? I’m completely out of the loop and have only heard of it in passing.
Open standard CPU instruction set. Meaning people can design new chips for it without needing to enter an expensive license agreement.
I would have thought the license agreement would be one of the least expensive parts of making modern high-performance chips.
Quite the opposite. Well, sort of.
It’s easy to get a licence, you just need money. Lots of money.
That’s if you can get a licence. Intel only licensed to AMD because the USA military requires two vendors.
ARM charges an, err, arm and a leg.
If you have the order volume, enough capital to book fab capacity and a solid margin, kind of. These agreements are often done in cents per chip with minimum volume amounts, this is why you see most complicated ARM SoCs targeted at the smartphone market first and trickle down into lower margin products later.
This is the consequences of only being able to get your licence from one vendor.
Because it’s an open Instruction Set Architecture.
Many different companies used to design their own CPU IS architectures in the past like (MIPS, AVR, PIC, …) and of course the most popular ARM. Downside of this is that the software and ecosystems between these architectures are not compatible. Effort wasted in porting a library to one architecture cannot be always reused for another.
Recently we see a lot of companies adopting RiscV, and there is a big collaboration between them to ratify the specification and provide software support. This will in turn accelerate the development, and software and hardware support will hopefully overtake ARM in the future.
