(Source: Semiconductor Industry Observation)
RISC-V is an emerging open-source instruction set architecture primarily used for processors (so far mainly as accelerators). However, new developments are emerging, and they seem ready to compete in the CPU space.
A year ago, the only way to use a RISC-V processor was to spend $1,000 on a development board from the RISC-V-based startup SiFive. Today, companies like SparkFun, BeagleBoard, Pine64, Rios, and others have released or are about to release single-board computers powered by RISC-V chips, with prices starting as low as $15. There is even a RISC-V microcomputer based on BBC’s Doctor Who for children to learn coding, priced at under $100.
Mark Himelstein, CTO of RISC-V International, stated, “Many vendors will continue to deploy this. Some of them are small, like SparkFun, which is clearly embedded, somewhat like the smallest Raspberry Pi. Then there’s BeagleBoard, which can run Linux. You will see people doing things holistically. The deployment range starts with development and then moves to the actual deployment of these things.”
Data Center Binding
RISC-V is already in data centers, not just as an accelerator but also taking on CPU responsibilities. For example, some HPC networks use RISC-V to process data in transit. It also seems to be transitioning to another role, providing power to servers, whose low power consumption makes them particularly useful for edge deployments.
Himelstein said, “There are already cloud servers based on RISC-V, and companies like Alibaba have already done this.
We hope to see the architecture support all functionalities from smartphones to HPC systems soon.
He added, “I know people are researching these things because they have talked about them at many of our conferences, and they come to our meetings asking what aspects of the workload they should care about.”
According to Himelstein, the reason more RISC-V servers have not yet appeared is not related to the readiness of the architecture but rather the time it takes hardware manufacturers to develop products and bring them to market. He mentioned that bringing embedded products to market might take about a year, while a server is more like five years.
He stated, “What determines this is the product runway. People have been working hard for a while, so as those periods end, you will start to see many products containing RISC-V.”
He added, “I think success breeds success. When people see others doing something novel and unique or benefiting from it, they will try to do the same.”
Modular Design
Currently, much of the work being done to level RISC-V with Intel, AMD, and Arm revolves around developing extensions, which are part of the chip’s modular design. Extensions can be seen as plugins that chip designers can use to add functionality to the chip, which can be called by software when needed. While some extensions provide unique capabilities for RISC-V, others include functionalities found in other types of chips.
For RISC-V, this modular design can somewhat alleviate the technical burdens found in other architecture designs. Since these functionalities can be pulled or redesigned as needed, they never become a long-term burden that RISC-V chip manufacturers must bear.
Because some extensions are very complex, if not designed carefully, they can negatively impact performance, so they must go through a rigorous approval process. Until recently, this included even straightforward extensions that could be easily integrated into the chip’s design without performance concerns.
For the latter, RISC-V International launched the Fast Track program last week to simplify the approval of these small extensions. As the name suggests, Fast Track significantly reduces the time required to approve extensions.
“Fast Track maintains the necessary checks and balances to ensure that extensions are designed correctly and adhere to RISC-V’s architectural approach while paving the way for RISC-V International to rapidly expand its standardized extension set,” explained Greg Favor, co-founder and CTO of Ventana Micro Systems, in a statement.
In addition to the announcement of Fast Track, the first extension to utilize this process, ZiHintPause, was introduced. This is an extension that software developers can activate to reduce chip power consumption in certain situations, which is particularly useful for IoT or edge devices that need to address power consumption issues.
Hardware Freedom
Himelstein stated that the same motivations driving developers to use open-source software are attracting hardware companies to adopt open-source RISC-V.
He said, “You will see more products hitting the market, covering everything from IoT to high-performance computing. That’s because RISC-V gives you freedom; it gives you the right to choose what you want; it frees you from the constraints of certain other architectures; it gives you a degree of financial freedom to build the inventory chips you need and then do all these things.
“It provides you with a lot of freedom, and people really like that. They learned this freedom in the software world through Linux, and now they are starting to realize, ‘Wow, I can do this in the hardware world, which is amazing.'”