RISC-V In The Datacenter Is No Risky Proposition
The Next Platform, April 4th, 2023
It was only a matter of time, perhaps, but the skyrocketing costs of designing chips is colliding with the ever-increasing need for performance, price/performance, and performance per watt. Something has got to give, and that thing might be the architectures currently used in the datacenter.
What the world needs, perhaps, is something akin to the Linux operating system when it comes to chip instruction sets - something that is shared and extended by the community but which nonetheless has governance that is informed both by technology and the economic realities of the tech sector.
For RISC-V International, the non-profit nosiness association that controls the ISA and other intellectual property related to the architecture, that job falls to Calista Redmond, who among other things ran the OpenPower Foundation that opened up IBM's Power chip architecture for a number of years.