Android supports different instruction set architectures(ISAs) including Arm and x86. Most smartphones, smartwatches and TVs in the market use Arm-based chipsets developed by either Qualcomm or MediaTek. However, should any other company want to develop arm-based processors, they would have to first pay licencing and royalty fees, which quickly add up to millions of dollars.
For most smaller companies interested in developing smartphones or TV processors, this is not a wise way to go about things. This is where the Reduced Instruction Set Computer V(RISC-V) ISA comes in. RISC-V in a nutshell is free, and anyone can design chips based on it without paying any royalty fees. To make things even better, Google has just announced official support for RISC-V at the company’s keynote that took place during the RISC-V Summit at the tail end of December.
By virtue of being free, companies that want to develop cheap processors will find it extremely valuable, while those that want to reduce their dependencies on competitors holding the licences to arm-based chips will also be interested. Intel for instance has already offered to manufacture RISC-V chipsets for commercial customers, while Google already used the architecture in the Google Pixel series when developing the Titan M2 security chip.
Lars Bergstrom who is the director of engineering at Android has said that he wants RISC-V to be seen as a “tier-1 platform” on Android, similar to what Arm is already. This was a significant change of tune from the sentiments he had at Google I/O 2022 where he suggested that RISC-V support wasn’t coming any time soon.
He further adds that you can now download and try a very limited version of Android for RISC-V. However, it lacks support for the Android Runtime (ART) for Java workloads. He expects ART to come out in the coming few months.
Since most Android apps are based on Java, app developers will not have to do a lot of work to ensure their applications run on RISC-V devices. ART will “translate” the bytecode into instructions RISC-V will understand, similar to how it translates the instructions to Arm for the smartphones we currently use.
To further add to RISC-V’s appeal, RISC-V International corporation is based in Switzerland and can therefore act as a neutral party to both the US and China. It will be certainly interesting to see how RISC-V shapes up over the coming months and years, and what it will mean for existing companies that already leverage Arm, the biggest of them being MediaTek and Qualcomm.
Photo: Siemens
