Computer

RISC-V promises but will it change the hardware landscape?

It’s not in the news every day, but the importance of the ISA RISC-V in future hardware is growing more and more. The reasons are various, but what is clear is that it has all the numbers to replace ARM in terms of being the most used ISAA in the world.

Why is RISC-V becoming a hardware revolution?

RISC-V_2Its open nature and its modularity, allow to create processors with ISA RISC-V that do not have the complete set and are fully specialized for certain tasks. What allows creating domain specific processors and accelerators easily for different developers.

NVIDIA in the process of purchasing ARM along with the cold war between China and the United States regarding semiconductors, has forced many companies to stop using the ISA ARM to upgrade to RISC-V in case the boycott is applied to them later. This has made RISC-V by its nature the reference ISA for the creation of new designs.

But it’s not just large companies outside the influence of the United States that have given RISC-V a boost. In training centers around the world are already training future engineers with RISC-V, allowing them to make processors from scratch. Companies are increasingly developing hardware-focused solutions by creating their own processors, either for general purpose or for the development of specific systems.

Both ARM and x86 are weighed down by their instructions

RISC-V_3

Apple’s adoption of ARM has created the collective myth that ISA is much better than x86. Reality? It is the decoder in the control unit of x86 CPUs that is a disadvantage. But ARM has been with us as ISA since the 1980s, it is almost as old as x86 and its instruction set has also reached a critical size.

The adoption of ARM in several markets was due to the fact that it is very easy to license its cores and use it to create an SoC, a microcontroller or any type of hardware that you wanted to get. With this, the design inherits parts not necessary for its usefulness. The fact that RISC-V is a newer, fully modular ISA is what makes it attractive. Engineers do not have to waste transistors on functions that the system they have designed will never use.

A set of instructions reduced to what is necessary also means placing a less complex decoder, which is the biggest problem with x86 and to a lesser extent with ARM-based CPUs. Moreover, the ISA has even been proposed for the creation of shader units of potential GPUs with RISC-V.

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