Startup Offers A Chip Based On The Open Source RISC-V Architecture (computerworld.com.au)

angry tapir shared this news from Computerworld: An open-source chip project is out to break the dominance of proprietary chips offered by Intel, AMD, and ARM... A startup called SiFive is the first to make a business out of the [open source] RISC-V architecture. The company is also the first to convert the RISC-V instruction set architecture into actual silicon. The company on Thursday announced it has created two new chip designs that can be licensed... but the company will not charge royalties. That makes it attractive alternative compared to chip designs from ARM and Imagination Technologies, which charge licensing fees and royalties.
One of RISC-V's inventors co-founded the company, and he says that support is growing -- pointing out that there's already a fork of Linux for RISC-V.

Comments

Re:open source? $25K for every chip feature...

[OrangeTide]

Anyone can produce a RISC-V. But you can pay these guys to have a ready to synthesize solution.

There is a free open source version, and it looks pretty good. But the free one (E310) is not going to have all of those extra bus interfaces. That makes it difficult to connect to high speed peripherals or have operate in a multiprocessor environment (especially SMP).

Ultimately SiFive is operating a business that serves other businesses, not end users. The licensing of IP is the classic (and safest) way to operate a fabless silicon business.

Nothing is preventing you from making your own RISC-V from scratch. Unlike something like ARM where you have to pay them fees to cover patents and trademark even if you don't use ARM's implementation. And honestly it's cheaper to license ARM's implementations than to get permission to make your own. With RISC-V the opposite is true, it's free to make your own or you can pay money to license from multiple companies, who hopefully compete with one another or differentiate in other ways.