Consortium's Move Will Boost RISC-V Ecosystem, Thankfully

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Jun. 05, 2023 – 

By Steve Leibson, EETimes (June 3, 203)

RISC-V represents an existential threat to Arm, and a new industry consortium plans to increase that threat of extinction by accelerating the development of open-source software for the RISC-V architecture. Members of the consortium this week announced the formation of the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) Project to do so.

The RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is a microprocessor phenomenon that started as an academic project at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) in 2010. Since then, the open-source RISC-V ISA has developed “the big ’mo”—momentum.

Back in the 1990s, Arm processors had the big ’mo, burrowing into the heart of nearly every mobile phone. In the 2000s, they wiped out most of the proprietary microcontroller (MCU) architectures scattered over the embedded landscape.

Today, Arm is increasingly in danger of losing leadership in those arenas, and everywhere else that Arm plays. While Arm retains a long list of licensees today, earned by decades of hard work, the RISE Project could help RISC-V surge in the processor-core ranks even more quickly by bringing some order and adult supervision to the ongoing development of RISC-V open-source software.

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