Alibaba Cloud gets more of Android working on RISC-V silicon

There are also non-free RISC-V cores, but they essentially have to continuously make the argument for their existence against the free cores that are available (support, verification resources, just being better designs in the short term, already being hardened for proprietary process nodes, etc.)

Yes, RISC-V is an open ISA, yes, like ARM there is no fab making canonical RISC-V chips. It does at least have the benefit of having support in the UEFI spec pretty much right out of the gate, which offers a standard boot path of sorts (Arm64 also supports UEFI, but most devices to this day have their own bespoke boot firmware and protocols, AFAIK. The unifying factor tends to be something like uboot, again, AFAIK.) but it also has more flexibility, which has the knock-on effect that it may be harder to know which RISC-V software can run on which RISC-V hardware.

I’m very curious to see where it goes. As a tinkerer I definitely have been looking for entire desktop computers that, weak or not, are truly open source and documented from the ground up. RISC-V platforms don’t solve that entirely (in fact it’s probably the remainder of SoC IP that poses the biggest problems) but it does offer an interesting option for a CPU.

Winning is likely to be a question of luck (a la Unix perhaps) and implementation quality.

when you talk about ARM, you have to license designs from the ARM, inc. Apple with its apple silicon is licensing from ARM the designs and IP from them.

with RISC-v, there is no company to hold you hostage for designs and all. its all open source so you can build your own chip, own design, own tech, everything.

this also means i assume that in the long run, if RISC-v and ARM are on equal footing, RISC-v would be more freer, cheaper because there is no licensing and other corporate stuff to go through like with ARM, inc

It's a bit of a mixed bag. I'd say if macro op fusion turns out to be viable, it can become the fastest of the three, if not, it will be somewhere between ARM and x86 due to its unique compression scheme. This obviously depends on your particular chip. Apple is way ahead of Qualcomm on the same ISA.

We already live in a world where chip designers pick and choose cores and components from any number of companies: processors we all know about, but things like USB3, HDMI, Bluetooth, and many others are often licensed from third parties. But for the numbers to work you've got to make lots of chips to handle the fixed costs.