Google’s recent summit announced that it will “support RISC-V” from now on, changing its neutral attitude towards the RISC-V architecture in the past, which symbolizes a big turn in the attitude towards adopting the architecture, and RISC-V will also enter Android with billions of units a year The device ecosystem is expected to be injected into the IP supply chain such as Andes (6533-TW), Si-Five and other huge businesses.
Google’s move is considered by the outside world to be a major impact on the Arm architecture. In particular, Android devices have at least 3 billion monthly active devices, which is the world’s largest device ecosystem. As Google intends to switch and begins to invest resources to support RISC- V is bound to drive the IC design industry to speed up the transformation and bring huge business opportunities to the IP industry.
The market is optimistic. Andes is a founding member of the RISC-V International Association, and its major shareholder is MediaTek (2454-TW). With Google’s action to support the conversion, Andes is expected to accelerate its penetration in the Android market.
The Android system is developed by Google and supports many different instruction set architectures (ISAs), among which Arm is the most common. However, Arm has recently faced many challenges, including the parent company Softbank’s intention to sell it to Huida (NVDA-US), Later, due to the US-China trade war, it was forced not to cooperate with Huawei. Recently, it has a lawsuit with its largest customer, Qualcomm (QCOM-US).
Arm is also considered by the outside world to be unstable enough, so that Google intends to decide to disperse and switch platforms. At the summit, Lars Bergstrom, head of Android system development, said frankly that Google was not interested in RISC-V before, but now it intends to use RISC-V. V is the first-tier platform (Tier1 Platform) in the Android system.
Lars Bergstrom also added that the Android system version of RISC-V is now open for download and applicable. It is expected that the official simulation system will come out in the first quarter. Although RISC-V still has a lot of work to do after it starts, the company will be committed to supporting RISC. -V.
In addition, in 2019, the RISC-V Foundation has moved from the United States to Switzerland, and changed its name to the RISC-V International Association, making RISC-V neutral to avoid choosing sides in the trade war. It also shows that the RISC-V open source architecture Not subject to U.S. export control prohibitions.
