Open Source RISC V Processor Gets Support From Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and Tesla (seekingalpha.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Google, Qualcomm, and Samsung "are among 80 tech companies joining forces to develop a new open-source chip design for new technologies like self-driving vehicles," writes Seeking Alpha, citing a (pay-walled) report on The Information. "Western Digital and Nvidia also plan to use the new chip design for some of their products," while Tesla "has joined the RISC-V Foundation and is considering using the tech in its new chip efforts."

MIT Technology Review adds that while Arm had hoped to bring their low-power/high performance processors to AI and self-driving cars, "The company that masterminded the processor inside your smartphone may find that a set of free-to-use alternative designs erode some of its future success."

Comments

What's so wrong about ARM?

[ctilsie242]

We went through an era of tons and tons of CPUs. An open source CPU is very nice, and would be useful for it to be adopted, but is there something wrong about ARM based CPUs that they couldn't be used for this task? ARM is no slouch when it comes to performance, and it it is pretty thrifty when it comes to wattage.

Is there something ARM can't do that a whole new CPU design is needed?

Re:What's so wrong about ARM?

[Daemonik]

ARM licenses their core chips, where manufacturers provide all the rest of the CPU's architecture, or ARM will license their architecture where companies can create their own cores around ARM's instruction set. So you're way off base as far as customization of ARM goes.

The interesting part of this new RISC-V chip is will all these competing companies be able to set aside their IP claims or will they bury the chip in so many patent encumbrances that it never leaves the fab.