Calista Redmond, the CEO of RISC-V International, spoke at Embedded World 2024, highlighting the growth and global presence of RISC-V. With over 2300 members in 70 countries, RISC-V is experiencing significant expansion, fostering collaboration on numerous specifications and standards. In the past two years alone, they have introduced 40 new specifications, providing building blocks for diverse designs.
RISC-V offers unique design freedom, allowing users to add extensions tailored to their specific needs, whether it’s for power, efficiency, vector processing, or virtualization. This approach contrasts with other architectures, which may burden users with unnecessary features. Additionally, RISC-V provides reserved encoding space for proprietary enhancements, enabling differentiation in designs. Redmond notes the versatility of RISC-V hardware, which spans from lightweight implementations to high-performance chips with thousands of cores. The architecture accommodates a wide spectrum of innovations, although specific shipment volumes for various chip sizes are not readily available due to the decentralized nature of RISC-V’s adoption.