Google and Qualcomm to bring RISC-V to the wrist in next-gen wearable platform Qualcomm has announced it will develop a platform to power devices running Google’s Wear OS, based on the permissibly licensed RISC-V instruction set architecture. A brief Qualcomm announcement describes the effort as an “expanded framework” that “will help pave the way for more products within the ecosystem to take advantage …
... who, last week, seemed to be trying to restrict / demonise the use of RISC-V.
Qualcomm have said that they're going to be exploring RISC-V. And with Arm's lawsuit, they have good reason.
My guess is that they're working very hard to realise this tech as soon as possible. It's a sensible strategy to start with lower-resource processors, but it won't stop there.
> Cheaper to manufacture, but don't hold your breath for those cost saving to get passed onto the customer, the extra profits will just go to the shareholders
This. To quote https://riscv.org/about/faq/
The RISC-V ISA is free and open with a permissive license for use by anyone in all types of implementations. Designers are free to develop proprietary or open source implementations for commercial or other exploitations as they see fit
The most likely scenario is that Qualcomm and the like will generate their own "special sauce" variants of RISC-V, and will then either refuse to share them, or licence them out at a price. Which will almost certainly be roughly equal to the price of buying a similar configuration from ARM.
Which in turn means that the RISC-V landscape is likely to be a lot more fractured than the ARM or Intel ecosystems.
Ah well. It'll keep life interesting!
