What’s the RISC-V movement all about? What are the major misconceptions about RISC-V? Has it moved from initial experimentation to practical implementation? At the all-digital CES 2021, a panel discussion hosted by Engadget’s Chris Schodt took a closer look at this research project turned design movement.
For instance, Krste Asanovic, chief architect at SiFive, said that RISC-V is not an open-source processor; instead, it’s an open standard, and anybody can implement it. Then, Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, clarified that open-source hardware is different from open-source software in the sense that you freeze instruction set architecture (ISA) as a durable long-term component. ISA is a vocabulary that the processor understands, and software is written in that vocabulary for the processor to understand it.