ITPro Today Article: RISC-V Summit Debuts To Showcase Open Source ISA

A year or so ago you’d probably have trouble finding someone who knew anything about the open source silicon project RISC-V. Then SiFive, a startup built around the reduced instruction set architecture, raised over $143,000 in a crowdfunding campaign taking pre-orders for HiFive Unleashed, a $999 single-board computer (SBC) for developers featuring what was then the most powerful RISC-V system, the Freedom U540, a multi-core processor that clocks at 1.5 GHz.
That proved there was considerable developer interest in the project, and it served as notice that this open source processor architecture was ready to tackle a wide range of workloads. Within weeks after the SBCs were delivered, the Linux distributions Debian and Red Hat’s Fedora announced they were working on ports to the architecture — a feat that was accomplished by both distros in near record time.
By this time NVIDIA had already been on the RISC-V bandwagon for a couple of years, having announced in 2016 that it was using RISC-V for the next generation of the Falcon micro-controller for its GPUs. An ecosystem of companies had also been growing around the ISA, mostly centered around using the technology in embedded IoT devices.
 
To read more, please visit: https://www.itprotoday.com/hardware/risc-v-summit-debuts-showcase-open-source-isa.