“Boosting Adoption Rates with Effective Collaboration and Strategic Coordination”

RISE Project: Accelerating RISC-V Adoption

In an effort to accelerate the adoption of RISC-V technology, industry leaders have joined forces to form the RISC-V Software Ecosystem (RISE) Project. The primary objective of the project is to ensure the rapid availability of software for high-performance and power-efficient RISC-V cores running high-level operating systems.

Project Details

The RISE Project focuses on coordinating and prioritizing efforts while collaborating on solving problems that remove roadblocks to adoption. By doing so, the project aims to remove the duplication of effort and get everybody working toward common goals, creating the most efficient path to widespread adoption.

Initial Focus

For its initial focus, the project has identified the following areas:

• Compilers and toolchains
• System libraries
• Kernel and virtualization
• Language runtimes
• Linux distro integration
• Debug/profiling tools
• Simulator/emulators
• System software

Members

The current members of the governing board include Google, Intel, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek, Nvidia, Qualcomm, SiFive, and others. Members have committed to the initiative with a €100,000 investment or the equivalent of two full-time engineers working on technical solutions.

Industry Support

According to Mark Skarpness, Vice President and General Manager of System Software Engineering at Intel, “Accelerating RISC-V support in the open-source software ecosystem, aligned with platform standards, is critical to the growth of RISC-V adoption.” Qualcomm agrees, with Larry Wikelius, Senior Director of Technical Standards, Qualcomm Technologies, stating, “RISC-V’s flexible, scalable, and open architecture enables benefits across the entire value chain – from silicon vendors to OEM manufacturers to end consumers.”

Market Objectives

Each RISE member has different target markets based on each company’s strategic business objectives. For instance, Nvidia’s accelerated computing platform will support the RISC-V open standard to help drive breakthroughs in data centers and various industries like automotive, healthcare, and robotics. Still, consumer and mobile applications are driving most of the requirements that will likely be derived from solutions for other verticals.

Opportunities

As workloads continue to get more demanding, including the increased demand for artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI, there is an increasing movement towards more specialized and sometimes customized processing and instruction sets. Challenges at Arm have also opened up a window of opportunity that is ripe for RISC-V to rise out of the theoretical primordial soup and further evolve into a real, commercially viable option.

Critical Step

The RISE project is a critical step toward widespread adoption of RISC-V technology, which is being developed and adopted by a growing list of semiconductor vendors and OEMs. By accelerating the development of the software ecosystem, the project will further proliferate the use of RISC-V over the next few years.