During the holidays, the footage of the recent “RISC-V Summit” was released for the world to see, and would you believe that Google showed up profess his love for the rising CPU architecture?
We tried to understand what the Android team thinks of RISC-V (reduced instruction set computer) for a while. We last heard a comment from the team six months ago where our Google I/O question about RISC-V has been answered only with We are looking, but it would be a big change for us. Some external RISC-V porting projects exist, and various RISC-V commitments have landed in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but since anyone can submit code to AOSP, it’s been difficult to make bold claims about RISC-V’s Android status. .
However, Google’s keynote at the RISC-V summit was all about bold claims. Lars Bergstrom, director of engineering at Android, wants RISC-V to be considered a “platform tier 1” in Android, which would put it on par with Arm. This is a big change from just six months ago. Bergstrom says getting Android builds optimized on RISC-V will be “a lot of work” and outlined a roadmap that will take “a few years” to materialize, but AOSP has started landing official RISC-V patches in september.
The build system is up and running and anyone can grab the latest “riscv64” branch whenever they want – and yes, as per his recent work on Arm, Google wants RISC-V on Android to be 64-bit only. For now, the most you can get is a command line, and Bergstrom’s slide promised “initial emulator support by early 2023, with Android RunTime support (ART) for Java workloads in the first quarter.”
One of Bergstrom’s slides featured the to-do list above, which included a ton of major Android components. Unlike Android’s unpolished support for x86, Bergstrom promised a real push for quality with RISC-V, saying, “We have to do all the hard work to get from a prototype and something that works to something that really sings – that shows off the best -in-class processors that [RISC-V International Chairman Krste Asanović] mentioned in the previous conversation.
Once Google installs Android on RISC-V, it will be up to manufacturers and the app ecosystem to get back to the platform. The fun thing about Android RunTime is that when ART supports RISC-V, so much of the Android app ecosystem will come with it. Android apps are delivered as Java code, and the way it becomes an ARM app is when the Android runtime compiles it into ARM code. Instead, it will soon be compiled to RISC-V code with no additional work from the developer. Native code that is not written in Java, such as games and component libraries, will need to be ported, but starting with Java code is a big step forward.
Arm has become an unstable volatile trading partner
In her opening remarks, the CEO of RISC-V International (the non-profit company that owns the architecture), Calista Redmond, said that “RISC-V is inevitable“thanks to the open business model and wave of open chip design it can create, and it’s becoming hard to argue against. While the show was mostly about the benefits of RISC-V, I want to add The main reason RISC-V seems inevitable is that the current processor leader Arm has become an unstable and volatile company, and it seems that any viable alternative would have a good chance of succeeding at this time.
Look at Arm’s behavior over the past few years. After some bad bets In 2020, we saw Arm owner Softbank slap a “for salesigns on to the world’s largest mobile chip company and starts taking sales meetings. For a while it looked like Nvidia – a company known to be difficult to work with-was going to be the new owner of Arm, bundling chip designs with GPUs and finding a new business partner with some of its most hated rivals. Regulators around the world end up close this agreement, and now Softbank wants Arm to have an IPO, which may or may not happendepending on the evolution of the economy.
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