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About the RISC-V ISA

RISC-V (pronounced “risk-five”) is an open, free ISA enabling a new era of processor innovation through open standard collaboration. Born in academia and research, RISC-V ISA delivers a new level of free, extensible software and hardware freedom on architecture, paving the way for the next 50 years of computing design and innovation.

The final Unprivileged Specification, a Privileged Specification, and a suite of RISC-V software tools including a GNU/GCC software tool chainGNU/GDB debugger (upstream), an LLVM compiler, a Spike ISA simulatorQEMU (upstream), and a verification suite is available for download now.

To sample the architecture without installing anything, try out ANGEL, a JavaScript ISA simulator that boots an interactive session of riscv-linux on a simulated RISC-V machine in your browser.

You can also visit the UC Berkeley Architecture Research projects page to see a number of RISC-V based projects including a high-performance, energy-efficient Rocket processor (a 64-bit RISC-V single-issue in-order core), suitable for both high-speed simulation and full synthesis, is available for download.

Our intent is to provide a long-lived open ISA with significant infrastructure support, including documentation, compiler tool chains, operating system ports, reference software simulators, cycle-accurate FPGA emulators, high-performance FPGA computers, efficient ASIC implementations of various target platform designs, configurable processor generators, architecture test suites, and teaching materials.

Key Features of the RISC-V ISA:

  • Delivers a new level of software and hardware freedom on architecture in an open extensible way.
  • Open ISA delivers easier support from a broad range of operating systems, software vendors and tool developers.
  • The open source of hardware, RISC-V does not rely on a single supplier – offers multiple suppliers, therefore, supports unlimited potential for future growth.
  • No other ISA is architected like the RISC-V ISA, allowing for user extensibility of the architecture without breaking existing extensions or incurring software fragmentation

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