>"As just one example, a recent microprocessor design using RISC-V has a clock speed of 5 gigahertz, well above a recent, top-of-the-line Intel Xeon server ch

>"As just one example, a recent microprocessor design using RISC-V has a clock speed of 5 gigahertz, well above a recent, top-of-the-line Intel Xeon server chip, E7, running at 3.2 gigahertz. Yet the novel RISC-V chip burns just 1 watt of power at 1.1 volts, less than one percent of the power burned by the Intel Xeon. [...] "It's kind of amazing," said David Patterson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who helped create RISC-V, in an interview with ZDNet, describing his impression of a demo he was given of the chip recently. "I think IBM mainframes have a 5-gigahertz product that's liquid-cooled, and takes 100 watts" to run. "I've also heard some impressive numbers around people doing FPGAs, around 600 megahertz," said Patterson, referring to re-programmable chips. "For a soft core, that seems pretty fast." [...] Because of the simplicity of the instruction set of RISC-V, Micro Magic was able to have its chip produced using a standard silicon wafer with no special tweaking. That makes it possible to use what is called a shuttle run, where the chip is grouped together in the manufacturing process with other people's chips, on the same wafer. That can be vastly cheaper because the wafer's cost is shared among so many parties."