The RISC-V standards body is moving to Switzerland over fear of US trade restrictions

guest · Nov 26, 2019

The RISC-V standards body is moving to Switzerland over fear of US trade restrictions
The US is putting a lot of pressure on the silicon industry
November 26, 2019
https://www.techspot.com/news/82930-risc-v-standards-body-moving-switzerland-over-fear.html

What just happened? The organization that crafts the standards behind RISC-V chipset architecture have an even bigger headache than dealing with the never-ending Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) battles. The political trade war is creating too much uncertainty, so the RISC-V Foundation is moving shop to Switzerland where it will continue its mission to direct the development of an open-source instruction set architecture for CPUs.

The RISC-V Foundation says Switzerland isn't the only choice it had when it organized a vote last year. The decision was announced at a summit in December 2018, and foundation chief Calista Redmond told Reuters in an interview that "from around the world, we’ve heard that if the incorporation was not in the U.S., we would be a lot more comfortable."

The move signals that in the face of tightening control by the US, companies might start to work around it by moving overseas.
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ronjor · Dec 11, 2019

RISC-V grows globally as an alternative to Arm and its license fees

Dean Takahashi@deantak December 11, 2019
ARM is the most successful microprocessor architecture on the planet, with its licensees shipping billions of chips a year. But a rival has emerged in the past few years called RISC-V, a new kind of royalty-free architecture started by academics. Its proponents are holding an event in the heart of Silicon Valley to tout the growth of the rival chip architecture.
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guest · Sep 27, 2020

The Nvidia-Arm deal hasn't boosted RISC-V. But it soon could
September 25, 2020
https://www.protocol.com/risc-v-chips-arm-nvidia

Arm doesn't make its own chips, so it doesn't compete with its customers.
But the Nvidia deal, if it goes through, could change that. For many chip companies, licensing Arm's technology could mean giving money not to a neutral company, but to a rival — a deeply uncomfortable position for any company to find itself in.

So the acquisition was assumed by many to be a huge boost to RISC-V, the only viable Arm competitor.
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Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V international, said the Nvidia-Arm deal hasn't changed anything just yet. "We've been growing so fast over the last five years that we're not noticing a significant swing at any one of these inflection points across the industry," Redmond told Protocol. But, she added, the acquisition "may be a call to evaluate choices for those who have not already adopted RISC-V."

In a conversation with Protocol, Redmond outlined RISC-V's priorities, described the project's hopes for Android support, and predicted that the organization is a couple of years away from its version of Arm's iPhone moment. [...]
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guest · Dec 6, 2021

RISC-V grows open source processor membership 130% in 2021
December 2, 2021

RISC-V International said it has grown during the pandemic as its RISC-V open source processor membership popped 130% in 2021.

The nonprofit group’s membership has grown from a ragtag group of feisty academics to some of the biggest tech companies on earth like Google. Over the past decade, the group has groomed RISC-V into a viable alternative to proprietary Arm and Intel-based processors, and it appears that a lot of big companies and engineering geeks like what they see.
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RISC-V chip revenues are expected to generate $400 million in 2021 and reach $1 billion in revenue by 2024, according to a prediction made this week by accounting and consulting firm Deloitte.

The firm said the ripples of RISC-V could turn into the waves of the future. Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, said in an interview with VentureBeat that there are 2,4278 members in the group now, up 130% since the start of the year, and 292 companies, up 27.5% this year.
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Redmond said one of the benefits of RISC-V is that it is sanction-free. As an open source platform, RISC-V is not affected by export restrictions.

This makes it appealing to companies, especially in China, that have been affected or fear being affected by those restrictions, Deloitte said. Redmond said that the nonprofit had to reboot its entire membership base as it transferred its headquarters from the U.S. to Switzerland in order to erase any doubt that it was independent of geographic borders.
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guest · Jan 29, 2023

What's next for RISC V?
By Jonathan Goldberg - January 29, 2023

Editor's take: Generally speaking we are big fans of RISC V. It does some things very well, handles many others well enough, and has clear signs of adoption and appeal. It meets a real market need in an innovative manner, exactly what we like to see from our technology. So we say this from a position of love – RISC V is going to have a big software problem. The good news is that it may not matter.
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First, some background. RISC V is an open-source instruction set architecture (ISA), a "free" alternative to Arm. ISAs provide a set of common, important but unglamorous "blueprints" for processors. Every processor needs what an ISA provides to do some basic math. They take a lot of work to design and maintain but do not provide much end-product differentiation, which means that the chip companies who use them see great advantage in outsourcing this work to a third party like Arm.

ISAs are incredibly sticky, changing to a new one is something that most chip companies loathe to do.
We do not want to overstate this, switching is not impossible, it is just hard. As we said above, it is a lot of friction.
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This could have been a big problem for RISC V to gain adoption.
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It's also entirely possible that someday RISC V's software environment will converge on more compatible solutions. This will take years and be full of sorts of problems -- anyone remember printer and GPU driver incompatibility? -- but it is still likely.

At this stage, RISC V looks unstoppable. That is a good thing. But it is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and it will encounter its share of growing pains, and many of those will take place in and around software compatibility. This does not present the same barrier it once did.
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