Beyond the adoption in servers now Google is showing support for RISC-V for Android. This is an open source architecture which is free to use in customizing your own chips, and is setting up to revolutionize hardware like open source, free(dom) software has revolutionized software.
In her opening remarks, RISC-V International (the nonprofit company that owns the architecture) CEO Calista Redmond argued that “RISC-V is inevitable” thanks to the open business model and wave of open chip design that it can create, and it’s getting hard to argue against that. While the show was mostly about the advantages of RISC-V, I want to add that the biggest reason RISC-V seems inevitable is that current CPU front-runner Arm has become an unstable, volatile company, and it feels like any viable alternative would have a good shot at success right now.
Just look at Arm’s behavior over the last few years. After a few bad bets in 2020, we saw Arm’s owner, Softbank, slap a “for sale” sign on the world’s biggest mobile chip company and start taking sales meetings. For a while, it looked like Nvidia—a company notorious for being difficult to work with—was going to be Arm’s new owner, bundle the chip designs with GPUs, and find itself a new business partner with some of its most hated rivals. Regulators around the world eventually shut that deal down, and now Softbank wants Arm to have an IPO, which may or may not happen, depending on how the economy goes.
RISC-V is seen as a way to be less reliant on the West. While the project started at UC Berkeley, RISC-V International says the open source architecture is not subject to US export law. In 2019, the RISC-V Foundation actually moved from the US to Switzerland and became “RISC-V International,” all to try to avoid picking a side in the US-China trade war. The result is that Chinese tech companies are rallying around RISC-V as the future chip architecture. One Chinese company hit by US export restrictions, the e-commerce giant Alibaba, has been the leading force in bringing RISC-V support to Android, and with Chinese companies playing a huge part in the Android ecosystem, it makes sense that Google would throw open the doors for official support. Now we just need someone to build a phone.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-announces-official-android-support-for-risc-v/