The majority of people in the tech community are well aware of the two main chip architectures: x86 and ARM. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Today, however, we’re talking about the new kid on the block: RISC-V. Today, we will look at the history of RISC-V and how it differs from the other offerings.
Where did RISC-V Come from?
Just like BSD, the RISC-V architecture was forged in the academic fires of the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Krste Asanović was working at the “Parallel Computing Laboratory (Par Lab) at UC Berkeley” in 2010. At the time, Asanović’s project needed an open-source computer system. He looked at what was available and decided to create something new. He figured that it would be a “short, three-month project over the summer”. He started working on the project in May 2010 and was joined by two of his graduate students, Yunsup Lee and Andrew Waterman. Later, David Patterson joined the project. Patterson originally coined the term RISC and contributed to a lot of RISC development. (RISC-V’s name is a reference to the fact that it was the fifth RISC project he worked on).