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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

I don't think people generally pay for RISC-V CPU IP.

For ISA? Certainly not. For actual designs, for sure. Why wouldn't they unless there's some open source designs they'd be using?

Well, because there are open-source designs they'd be using. The GD32V microcontroller, for example, uses Nucleisys's BumbleBee, and high-performance chips from several vendors use Brother Honey Badger's Apache-licensed XuanTie C910: https://github.com/XUANTIE-RV/openc910

But see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44503847

There are open source designs. Here is one:

https://github.com/riscv-boom/riscv-boom

Companies that are putting down millions for fab runs absolutely pay shitloads of money for it. The cost of design and verification of those components is enormous and that's mostly what you pay for. People have been shipping Andes and SiFive IP for years now. Downloading source dumps for C910 cores is not the hard part.

For most places that kind of high-cost work doesn't make much sense when their product isn't "a CPU", and they also typically have to buy other IP anyway like memory controllers or I/O blocks -- so buying a CPU core isn't that strange in the grand scheme.

Thank you very much!

They do if they aren't implementing the ISA in silicon themselves. Its interesting to see who's designs are selling, who's aren't and why.

Sure they do, most IP is proprietary

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