Google announces official Android RISC-V support

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Android, the operating system developed by Google, currently supports a couple of different instruction set architectures (ISAs), such as Arm and x86. Most devices that use Android, including smartphones, tablets, TVs, and smartwatches, use Arm-based chipsets. Intel stopped producing CPUs for phones, and support for MIPS was removed in NDK revision 17. However, one ISA that has a lot of chatter is Reduced Instruction Set Computer V, RISC-V, which is a free and open ISA. Anyone is free to design chips based on it without paying any licensing or royalty fees, and Google announced official support for it at the company's keynote that took place during the RISC-V Summit.

www.xda-developers.com, Jan. 04, 2023 – 

RISC-V is special because it's a free and open ISA, and vendors that want to make cheap IoT products will be interested in using RISC-V to develop low-cost chips. At the same time, companies seeking to reduce their dependence on competitors or foreign entities will also be looking in earnest. Interestingly, Google already makes use of the RISC-V architecture for its Titan M2 security chip in the Google Pixel series, and Intel is now offering to manufacture RISC-V chipsets for commercial customers.

At the company's keynote, Lars Bergstrom, Android's director of engineering, said that he wants RISC-V to be seen as a "tier-1 platform" in Android. This is on par with what Arm currently is to Android, a rather bold step to take in the face of what seemed to previously be complete disinterest from Google. The Android team, in response to ArsTechnica's Ron Amadeo when he asked the team if RISC-V support was on the cards at Google I/O 2022, seemed to suggest that RISC-V wasn't coming anytime soon. Amadeo's question regarding RISC-V support in the future was answered with "we're watching, but it would be a big change for us."

Bergstrom says that you can download and try a very limited version of Android for RISC-V right now, but it lacks support for the Android Runtime (ART) for Java workloads. He said he expects official emulator support to come soon, with ART to come sometime in Q1 of 2023. He shared the above slide, which shows that while there's a lot to do to get AOSP off the ground on RISC-V, the company is committed to the architecture.

The best part of all of this is that developers won't have to do a whole lot to have their apps run on RISC-V devices. ART basically "translates" bytecode into native instructions of the device that it's running on, so it would be translating to RISC-V instead of Arm. Native code is a different story, but Java code makes up the entirety of most Android apps.

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