Google announces official support for Android RISC-V

[ad_1]

Google has officially announced its support for the RISC-V architecture, an alternative ISA with no license fees.

Android, the operating system developed by Google, currently supports a couple of different instruction set architectures (ISAs), such as ARM and x86. Most devices that use Android, including smartphones, tablets, TVs, and smartwatches, use Arm-based chipsets. Intel stopped making phone CPUs and support for MIPS was removed in NDK revision 17. However, one ISA that gets a lot of talk is Reduced Instruction Set Computer V, RISC-V, which is a free and open ISA. Anyone is free to design chips based on it without paying any licenses or royalties, and Google announced its official support during the company’s keynote that took place during the RISC-V Summit.

RISC-V is special because it’s a free and open ISA, and vendors who want to make cheap IoT products will be interested in using RISC-V to develop low-cost chips. At the same time, companies looking to reduce their reliance on foreign competitors or entities will also look hard. Interestingly, Google already uses the RISC-V architecture for its Titan M2 security chip in the Google Pixel series, and Intel is now manufacturing RISC-V chipsets for commercial customers.

At the company’s keynote, Android director of engineering Lars Bergstrom said he wants RISC-V to be seen as a “level 1 platform” in Android. This is on par with what Arm is currently for Android, a pretty bold step to take in the face of what previously appeared to be a complete disinterest from Google. The Android team, in response to ArsTechnica’s Ron Amadeo when he asked the team if RISC-V support was expected at Google I/O 2022, seemed to suggest that RISC-V wasn’t coming anytime soon. Amadeo’s question about RISC-V support in the future was answered with “we’re looking at it, but that would be a big change for us.”

Bergstrom says you can download and try a very limited version of Android for RISC-V right now, but it lacks Android Runtime (ART) support for Java workloads. He said he expects official emulator support to arrive soon, with ART arriving in Q1 2023. He shared the slide above, which shows that while there’s a lot to be done to get AOSP on RISC-V off the ground, the company is dedicated to architecture.

The best part of all of this is that developers won’t have to do much to get their apps working on RISC-V devices. ART basically “translates” the bytecode into instructions native to the device it’s running on, so it would translate to RISC-V instead of ARM. Native code is a different story, but Java code makes up the entirety of most Android apps.

As for why companies might want to jump ship from Arm, there are a few reasons. For starters, the company has been incredibly volatile. SoftBank, its owner, tried to sell the company to Nvidia, but went bankrupt. Furthermore, Arm has become a pawn in trade sanctions imposed on companies like Huawei, where it has been forced to cut off contact for several months. Even worse is that Arm is suing Qualcomm over the purchase of Nuvia, and it’s not a good idea to sue one of your biggest customers.

RISC-V is seen as an escape from Western dependency, and much of that is due to the incorporation of RISC-V International in Switzerland. It can act as a neutral party to both the US and China, making it an attractive option for companies looking to design chipsets. Alibaba is a major proponent of RISC-V, and the company’s engineers ported Android 10 to a RISC-V board two years ago.

We’ll be watching and waiting to see how RISC-V shapes up in the coming months. While it will probably be some time before we see viable flagship devices with RISC-V chipsets on the market, Google is certainly opening the door for companies to give it a try.

Source: Google

Via: ArsTechnica

[ad_2]