I'm no expert, but in lieu of not having any sibling comments yet, let me offer my amateur view: The name RISC-V (which I'm supposing you're referring to) come

I'm no expert, but in lieu of not having any sibling comments yet, let me offer my amateur view: The name RISC-V (which I'm supposing you're referring to) comes from "reduced instruction set computer (RISC)" (from around 1980s), with a added "five". It's a instruction set architecture (ISA) which is basically a abstract specification for how a CPUs instructions could be. RISC-V is not a company, but a "open standard" for this ISA. While ARM for example both maintains a ISA, runs a company and builds chips, RISC-V is maintained by a foundation which many companies are a part of. RISC-V is exciting because it's one of the few open standard ISA with a lot of public references and available material for curious hackers, compared to what we've seen before. So far, the performance and the power consumption (as far as I know) hasn't been as optimized as other architectures, so it's still early to tell if it'll have some larger impact on the industry at large or not.