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RISC-V Overview

This is a story of one guy who wanted to work on a 3 months summer project and ended up changing the semiconductor processor market forever.

 

RISC-V, pronounced as Risk-Five, is an open specification of an ISA, or Instruction Set Architecture. It’s an open source, transparent and royalty free computer processor architecture. The RISC-V project came from UC Berkeley to solve some of the existing issues with current processor architecture.

 

The idea behind open source is to enable companies to freely adapt, extend and implement to any size or performance processor. This means a huge win for both the consumer and vendors. Nvidia, Western Digital and many other vendors are about to ship (or shipping already) CPUs based on RISC-V architecture.

 

RISC-V has an array of 32 registers holding the processor’s running state, and the data being immediately operated on. This array is enabling the CPU to run without (or with minimum) external memory activities for many of the basic operation – this allows lower power consumption and increased performance. RISC-V has 32-bit, 64-bit and 128-bit variants.

 

Image result for risc v chip

 

The RISC-V website offers wealth of information, design tools, boot builders, programming languages and operating systems. In addition to that, there are a few of IC simulations, and designs that can be download into various FPGAs.

 

RISC-V Foundation

 

The RISC-V Foundation was founded in 2015, a non-profit corporation that directs the future development and the adoption of the RISC-V ISA. Currently, there are 325 members and all members have access to and participate in the development of the RISC-V ISA specifications and related HW / SW ecosystem. The Foundation has a Board of Directors comprising seven representatives from Bluespec, Inc.; Google; Microsemi; NVIDIA; NXP; University of California, Berkeley; and Western Digital.

 

 

RISC-V Benefits

 

  • Simplicity: Sometimes, simple is better and the RISC-V proves that with its small and minimalistic design.
  • Modularity: RISC-V is modular in nature, having a relatively small standard base ISA which houses multiple standard extensions.
  • Customizability: The RISC-V ISA has been specially designed to allow for variable length coding, hosting a vast opcode space that can be used for instruction set extensions if and when needed to customize and specialize the ISA based on project specifications.
  • Efficiency: Often RISC-V does not require separate memory to execute and can run from the internal register array.
  • Stability: One of the benefits of using the RISC-V is that it is extremely stable owing to its frozen base and standard extensions.
  • Clarity: As mentioned above, the smallness of the ISA ensures that it is clear in its architecture and not confusing, avoiding tech dependent features and instead opting to draw a clear line between user and privileged ISA.

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