RISC-V is a open instruction set architecture originally developed at UC Berkeley for research and education that has been seeing a lot of exciting developments lately. You can buy a RISV-V based microcontroller right now. It is officially supported by GCC. The lowRISC project, founded by some of the same people responsible for Raspberry Pi, aims to provide a fully open source Linux system-on-a-chip. UC Berkeley has developed a (relatively) high performance, super-scalar, out-of-order RISC-V core.

2023-02-11: RISC-V status update. I remain skeptical because only losing players have adopted it, probably out of a position of weakness. Citing government investments as helpful is hilarious.

RISC-V is inevitable. RISC-V is going to have the best processors. And RISC-V is going to have the best ecosystem. All the technical stuff in RISC-V is amazing, but it’s really this change in the business model that makes RISC-V inevitable. And just think about this: Once you move to a high-quality open standard, you never go back to sole-source proprietary standards.

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