It's an ISA whose purpose is to be an open alternative for people developing microprocessors. It's actually a (large) family of ISAs, suitable for diverse appl

It's an ISA whose purpose is to be an open alternative for people developing microprocessors. It's actually a (large) family of ISAs, suitable for diverse applications. The major advantage over rolling your own is that you don't have to develop the tools, and you can leverage quite a lot of software (still growing daily). The major advantages over going with Arm is that you have the freedom to extended the architecture (in a well-defined manner) and the ISA is completely open and free. You can implement it yourself, use on of many open source implementations, or license the IP from many companies, including SiFive. Nearly all machine learning startups use RISC-V for this reason, including Esperanto Technology. Off the shelf chips are slow to come out, but there's a steady stream. The next generation of the ESP32 is RISC-V based and there's also BL602 in the same class. For desktop (RV64GC)[1], I'm not aware of any chips for sale, but SiFive sells motherboards with their chips. I expect a lot more RISC-V silicon in 2021, including RV64GC capable parts. [1] see my rant elsewhere of why the "C" part is a !@#$ disaster.