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Does anyone know of good introduction for RISC V and why I should care about it from a technical perspective? I get the Open Source argument. And I get that x8

• rwmj 10y ago
  I think the design technically is more elegant. The instruction format is better: there are only a few formats, register numbers are always in the same place, which makes instruction decoding easier. The instruction set is also properly extensible, you can add extensions in an official way. They've avoided making lots of special-case instructions, claiming that micro-op fusion can be used to the same effect. The financial argument is: You want to license an ARM-like chip design, without paying any license fees. Lots of companies currently license ARM and use it to make everything from embedded controllers to tablet computers. They pay ARM both a one-off license fee and per core manufactured (actually the fees are not that large in the grand scheme of chip design). There are several RISC-V designs, which are BSD licensed, or you can make your own without any licensing fees. However if you want to call it "RISC-V" or use the logo you have to join the Foundation. If you don't want to call it "RISC-V" then the license is completely free. Of course what's missing is the ecosystem: Linux, Android, and massive numbers of tools. That's why this announcement of the Debian on RISC-V project restarting is interesting. (Forget about licensing an x86 design, that is basically impossible).