RISC-V Gains Its Footing

Feb. 26, 2018 – 

The RISC-V instruction-set architecture, which started as a UC Berkeley project to improve energy efficiency, is gaining steam across the industry.

The RISC-V Foundation's member roster gives an indication who is behind this effort. Members include Google, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Rambus, Samsung, NXP, Micron, IBM, GlobalFoundries, UltraSoC, Siemens, among many others.

One of the key markets for this technology involves storage controllers with multiple companies, said Krste Asanovic, co-founder and chief architect at SiFive, and chairman of the RISC-V Foundation. He described it as integration with memory, along with a PCIe slave that plugs into the back of a server, to provide very high performance flash storage.