China Is All In on a RISC-V Future
The Register, Monday, January 8th, 2024
The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
The report, entitled 'Examining China's Grand Strategy For RISC-V' is part of their China Brief segment and leans on the security concerns of RISC-V.
It is an open processor instruction set architecture (ISA) for those unfamiliar with RISC-V. Unlike ISAs from Intel or Arm, the RISC-V ISA is an open standard that allows underlying software to communicate in a consistent fashion with the processor that adheres to the ISA. Intel and ARM ISAs must be licensed for a fee from their respective owners (AMD has an x86 license from Intel). RISC-V was developed around 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley, and was conceived as an alternative to the complexities and costs of proprietary ISAs.