Ventana Micro Systems has raised $38 million to design datacenter RISC-V processors as part of a push to create open hardware.
Ventana’s chips will be based on RISC-V, a new open source processor architecture that has emerged as an alternative to the popular Arm chip architecture. The latter might become part of Nvidia one of these days if regulators approve the company’s $40 billion Arm acquisition. In contrast to Arm, RISC-V charges no royalty fees.