Keeping It 100: RISC-V Reality Check

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Hype about the RISC-V market has been rising consistently since the first board was released in 2015, but developments over the last 18 months merit closer examination, and we've been digging in.

embeddedcomputing.com/, Dec. 05, 2023 – 

Last year, Intel made a big noise about launching a RISC-V development project, dubbed Pathfinder. That project lasted less than a year before it was cancelled. Since, Intel has reportedly been recommending customers use third-party RISC-V tools in future CPU designs. Meanwhile, analyst firms are putting the market size in the half a billion dollar range with big predictions for growth (standard grain of salt there), based mainly on autonomous vehicles, IoT implementations, and the self-feeding hype cycle of adopters. At the recent RISC-V Summit in Santa Clara, CA (check out our coverage here), big players like Meta made big moves into the space, but there's still some skepticism.

RISC-V has a ton of advantages (just ask anyone who's already on board), but it's not yet a golden ticket to the microprocessor promised land. There are solid reasons that it's not already the de facto standard for deployment at scale.

The first big problem you're likely to run into is not new to frequent waders in open source waters: lack of support. After the RISC-V Summit in Barcelona earlier this year, Agam Shah wrote in The New Stack, "the developer support is pitiful. RISC-V International... talks more about hardware, with software a distant second in priorities." Now, since that statement, the organization has brought on new members that are focusing on software, most notably for data centers and AI implementations.

Still, new entrants should be prepared to do a lot of the support work if they run into problems. The solutions are out there, but you're likely going to have to rely on forums and GitHub threads to find troubleshooting help, especially on the software side. That is, unless you've opted to work with a provider that's going to offer you a toolset and support through the development and systems integration processes.

There are many negative perceptions you've likely heard about RISC-V architectures. Many of those are common to open architectures of all kinds, as you might imagine. These might include: it's not as secure, it's too fragmented, or it won't be capable of the highest-level performance or robustness.

As is often the case, these objections are subjective and are dependent on the build and the needs of the project. In point of fact, they're usually not true for ISA builds that leverage recognized RISC-V partners and providers. David Patterson, vice-chair of the RISC-V International Board of Directors published a blog addressing many of these (and more).

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