Will the era of open source ISA’RISC-V’ come?

Most of the CPUs used in PCs and servers around the world are designed with Intel x86 instruction set architecture ISA. Also, it is the ARM architecture that is used for most of the CPUs used in smartphones. The CPU ISA market is dominated by Intel and ARM.

Among these, RISC-V, an open-source ISA, has the potential to destroy their shouts. What are the strengths and weaknesses that make RISC-V the driving force to dominate the market?

If you’re a normal user, you use a PC or smartphone app, but you’re worried about the operating system, but you’re not conscious of what the CPU is. But a software developer who needs to get the most out of CPU performance, or a hardware developer who needs to know which CPU the software needs, can’t ignore what instructions the CPU operates on. Therefore, it is ISA that standardizes the instructions and related contents available to the CPU in advance.

However, until now, ISA is not available to anyone, and to develop a CPU using ISA, a high royalty paid to companies such as Intel and ARM. For this reason, RISC-V, an open source ISA that anyone can use for free. With the emergence of RISC-V, which is not only a semiconductor maker that manufactures CPUs, but also allows other industries and educational institutions to build an ecosystem, innovation in a new era is expected.

RISC-V has three strengths that ISA did not have. First, pay royalties. The absence of royalties makes it possible to manufacture devices inexpensively, so devices and infrastructure equipment with sufficient performance can quickly become popular. The Internet of Things could make new progress.

The second advantage is the negotiation to use ISA. ISA provided by a hardware manufacturer requires high royalties and long-term negotiations. A typical commercial ISA license negotiation takes six months or two years. The fact that it takes a long time to start using ISA is a big burden for small developers and startups. The use of RISC-V, which does not require such negotiations, allows lighter development, so innovation can be expected to accelerate further.

Third, it is free from the state and large corporations. The US and China are fighting a fierce trade war, and both sides are responding with retaliatory tariffs and export restrictions. Chinese tech companies are in trouble because they can’t use products made by American companies, but open source RISC-V has nothing to do with export restrictions.

In fact, in July, Alibaba, the world’s largest e-commerce company, announced a CPU that adopted RISC-V, and Huawei is also showing its intention to adopt RISC-V for its CPU. In the future, this trend is expected to become more prominent.

The RISC-V is evaluated to have come just before the day of popularization with these advantages. However, it also has its drawbacks. This means that the architecture has not yet been refined as it has a shorter history than Intel or ARM. Intel and ARM have dominated the CPU market for decades, so most of the existing products are optimized for these CPUs. In addition, since Intel and ARM are in charge of CPU development, testing, and manufacturing alone, and can provide customers with CPUs with high reliability, it can be expected to maintain certain competitiveness for the time being.

Based on these strengths and weaknesses, RISC-V can be analyzed as having a high probability of success in products other than PCs and smartphones. Also, if open source software was the main character in the spread of smartphones that took place over the past decade, open source hardware holds the key for the next 10 years. Related information can be found here .