Google wants RISC-V to be a “tier-1” Android architecture

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-announces-official-android-support-for-risc-v/

by soulbadguy • 4 years ago

393 212 4 years ago

arstechnica.com

gjsman-1000• 4 years ago

Fantastic… but on what? RISC-V is still not quite Raspberry Pi 4-level on the fastest chips, but is advancing quickly.

Is this going to primarily be the newest chipset for cheap Kindles?

chriscappuccio• 4 years ago

Read the article. They're preparing for RISC-V chips to take over the crown from ARM as ARM is not a stable company.

stefan_• 4 years ago

Meanwhile, the RISC-V "ecosystem" is already a full shambles, with companies shipping chips implementing preliminary, not 1.0 released extensions and adding on their own proprietary extension instructions.

It's like ARM before v7 or v8, only dumber, because at least ARM back then had an excuse for why they were fracturing it all so badly.

Also, of course, ARM has lots of other IP you need to build a full-blown smartphone SoC; think GPU, display processors and pipelines, video accelerators, ... - to make a RISC-V smartphone you will have to buy all of those in because there is no "RISC-V ecosystem" replacement (and it's rather unlikely there ever will be) and at that point... what's the point anymore?

bee_rider4• 4 years ago

Is there a bootstrapping issue here that Google can solve? It seems to me that the market for fast RISC-V processors is pretty small until there’s a consumer-friendly OS to run on the things, and of course only hobbyists will port their OS to a slow chip.

The ecosystem could slowly grow through hobbyists, niche devices, special-purpose compute appliances, blah blah… or some entity with unlimited money could just do the short-term irrational thing and jumpstart one side of the equation.

snvzz22• 4 years ago

Linux support is quite solid already, and Debian (largest Linux distribution) builds over 95% of packages for this architecture. The only major runtime missing is dotnet.

This is about Android, which is very different from your average Linux system.

BlueTemplar2• 4 years ago

Also depends on how stringent the EU is going to be about enforcing their laws. If iOS/Android/Windows/Intel/(Ryzen?)/Huawei... do get banned in practice rather than just in theory, this opens up quite the field for Linux/RISC-V !

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I

zzz345345• 4 years ago

RaspberryPi designs are not completely open and RISC-V is, right?

laweijfmvo• 4 years ago

RISC-V is an open ISA. It doesn't mean you can't build a closed system on RISC-V, nor does it guarantee anything about the firmwares and auxiliary chips (wifi etc).

snvzz22• 4 years ago

RISC-V is an ISA or Instruction Set Architecture.

This defines the interface between hardware and software. If software and hardware both follow the specification, then the software will run on the hardware, and the hardware will run the software.

Both the hardware and the software could be entirely proprietary and extremely locked up, while compliant, as that'd fall well outside the ISA's scope.

RobotToaster2• 4 years ago

It's neither.

The broadcom SOC closed source, and it doesn't have public documentation. Also it has a videocore core running a proprietary RTOS called microsoft ThreadX that does bootstrapping and some low level hardware stuff.

snvzz22• 4 years ago

RISC-V is still not quite Raspberry Pi 4-level on the fastest chips

Current chips in cheap SBCs are already equal or above Raspberry Pi 4 level[0]. Particularly so when most Raspberry Pi 4 do not have a sufficient cooling solution and will be quickly throttled under load.

The fastest announced chips are competitive with the top x86-64 chips[1].

0. https://nitter.net/pic/orig/enc/bWVkaWEvRmozSEZOR1VvQUE4WWlP...

1. https://www.hpcwire.com/2022/12/13/ventana-plans-to-bring-ri...

Sakos• 4 years ago

The fastest announced chips are competitive with the top x86-64 chips[1].

I'm gonna need to see benchmarks before I believe that.

monocasa• 4 years ago

VisonFive 2 is a decent amount faster than a RPi4.

And there was a floodgate opened for high perf core announcements at the recent RISC-V summit. https://www.semianalysis.com/p/ventana-risc-v-cpus-beating-n... Most of those are probably bullshiting some major aspect of their cores' perf but there's designs like from from Jim Keller's Tenstorrent too. Jim Keller is sort of known for not bullshitting.

hajile• 4 years ago

There's a big difference here. A lot of very good designers saw a way to cash in on the emerging RISC-V market. Chip designers saw the potential and joined stealth startups where they could go from $400k per year to many millions. This potential payout poached a LOT of the best designers from big-name design companies.

I think there's a lot of potential here and probably a bit less over-promising than you'd get from companies without such experienced design talent.

brucehoult3• 4 years ago

It's not, it's a bit slower. But anyway it's close enough that unless you put two side by side or use a stopwatch you probably wouldn't notice the difference.

brucehoult3• 4 years ago

RISC-V is still not quite Raspberry Pi 4-level on the fastest chips, but is advancing quickly.

RISC-V is not quite Pi 4 level on the fastest SBC you can buy today, the VisionFive 2, where some kickstarter backers have already received their boards. It's around 80% as fast as Pi 4.

Sipeed have announced their LM4A with TH1520 SoC will be on sale late Q1. They've published benchmarks running at 1.85 GHz showing it is faster than Pi 4 at that speed, but it is supposed to run at 2.5 GHz with a heatsink.

SiFive have announced that their HiFive Pro board will be shipping in the summer, using Intel's "Horse Creek" SoC (which in turn uses SiFive P550 cores). The SoC was demonstrated running by Intel back in September. SiFive says the board will run at 2.2 GHz. It's should be similar performance as an RK3588 at similar clock speed i.e. quite a lot faster than a Pi 4.

Multiple other companies are working on RISC-V SoCs with performance in Apple M1 class, which is much faster than anything ARM themselves has. They're further away -- 2024 or 2025 -- but there is basically no doubt that they will come.

Android software probably isn't going to be ready for prime time until 2024 or 2025 anyway.

Vogtinator2• 4 years ago

Multiple other companies are working on RISC-V SoCs with performance in Apple M1 class, which is much faster than anything ARM themselves has.

Which companies?

debatem1• 4 years ago

Yeah well they wanted Intel to be one too. I don't think you can buy a phone running x86 or x86_64 new anywhere, and that was back in the honeycomb timeframe.

cma• 4 years ago

You can run android apps on x64 chromebooks though.

RobotToaster2• 4 years ago

I was a little surprised the edison/galileo platform didn't takeoff, their main problem seemed to be zero documentation.

snvzz22• 4 years ago

That'd depend on who you ask. Many will tell you any RISC choice is better, and there's no reason to use x86 when not tied by having to be compatible with legacy applications.

pantalaimon3• 4 years ago

It was also much more expensive than comparable ARM chips with no benefits - in fact it came with the huge drawback that it was a completely new platform in that space.

Exmoor• 4 years ago

I had a Zenfone 2, which ran Marshmallow on the Intel chipset. Decent phone and I don't remember having many complaints other than it didn't support my carrier's wifi calling which ended up being a dealbreaker when I got moved to an office that doubled as a faraday cage.

inhumantsar• 4 years ago

I had a Zenfone 2 as well and my main complaint was battery life.

It was definitely more power hungry than comparable competitors and not noticeably faster.

lmm• 4 years ago

You can buy a Librem new (or rather any struggle struggle is because they're sold out, not because they're not being made) and it runs x86, though I don't think that undermines your point by much.

preisschild2• 4 years ago

Which Librem device are you talking about? Their smartphone (Librem 5) has 4 ARM Cortex A53 cores.

babypuncher• 4 years ago

I think that has more to do with Intel failing to offer any competitive chips in this space. The entire company seemingly assumed phones and tablets were just a fad and spent the better part of a decade treating AMD as their only competitor.

snvzz22• 4 years ago

No surprises there.

RISC-V is the future, and Google itself already has some public RISC-V designs.

The expectation is that some Pixel in not so distant future will debut with a highly competitive RISC-V SoC.

bitL• 4 years ago

They are designing a new chip for their cloud...

booi• 4 years ago

Didn’t they just release their ARM virtual servers?

viraptor5• 4 years ago

That's going to be interesting to see. Apple could pull off the change in infrastructure and tell devs to deal with it. But could Google do the same with lots of apps in the store which contain native code?

0cf8612b2e1e• 4 years ago

Not an Android developer, but it seems that all I hear is the upgrade treadmill for Android APIs. That is without changing the underlying architecture.

marticode• 4 years ago

Well the benefit of having Java/Kotlin being the default dev language for Android is there's no need to recompile to run those apps on another arch. Only apps with native code will be an issue.

mkl• 4 years ago

When Intel was trying to make x86 phones a thing they supplied Google with an ahead-of-time binary translation system. The same could be done with RISC-V.

crossroadsguy• 4 years ago

Yup. They can and they can also tell the devs to deal with it. Android devs, like me, aren’t into android development for the love of the dev tools and the environment (which are pathetic at best). They are there because they have to — one way or the another.

izacus3• 4 years ago

Not sure what you're talking about here, Android supports 4 architectures right now (supported 6 before) and adding one more isn't such a big deal.

kayson• 4 years ago

Of course they do. No one wants to pay ARMs licensing fees but there isn't really any other marketable option.

fbdab103• 4 years ago

I hear this all the time, but are there any public numbers on how much money is spent on licensing? Are we talking pennies per chip (which adds up) or tens of dollars per shipped device? ARM was going to sell for "only" $40 billion, which makes me think that per device fees are low (there is an ARM chip in everything).

hristov4• 4 years ago

ARM reported 2.7 billion in revenues in fiscal 2021 (I cannot seem to find 2022 results easily).

Namidairo• 4 years ago

"2021 licensing (non-royalty) revenues were up 61% to $1.13Bn as our expanded product portfolio and new business models such as Arm Flexible Access gave more customers more reasons and more ways to license Arm technology.

2021 royalty revenues were up 20% to a record $1.54Bn, helped by continuing strong growth of 5G smartphones, more ADAS and IVI chips going into cars, and price increases in 32-bit microcontrollers."

Source: https://www.arm.com/company/news/2022/05/arm-delivers-record...

The royalties are higher on the newer more complex designs, so the 29.2 billion chips number can't really be used to derive a proper price per chip.

Don't even get people started on the perpetual and architectural licensing too.

rwmj2• 4 years ago

It's not really about the level of the fees.

RISC-V is "permissionless". Grab a core from github, grab the freely available specs, and start working. No up front agreement, no fees down the road. For Arm you have to enter a legal agreement before you can start, and then negotiate licensing for your product.

Also Arm have been acting aggressively recently which doesn't make other customers feel happy: https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/01/qualcomm_arm_cpu/

edrxty• 4 years ago

It's not just the fees. ARMs licensing terms are fucking annoying. They're militant about their shitty IP so they refuse to license their cores for FPGA based deployments, for instance.

amelius• 4 years ago

This is very consumer oriented thinking.

Industry wants RISC-V too.

charcircuit• 4 years ago

How does this help consumers?

The main difference to consumers is that less apps will be available since they haven't been ported to RISC-V

bigyikes• 4 years ago

Maybe this is naive, but the way I see it is: more architectures = more room for innovation. Ultimately RISC-V will allow for more competition in the CPU space, driving down prices for consumers.

lallysingh2• 4 years ago

Cheaper cpus that can get specialized for more domains, as there isn't the same cost/innovation bottleneck as ARM/x86.

And Android runs a VM, last time I checked..

zamalek• 4 years ago

How does this help consumers?

The same asked of ARM, just look at the Surface critique.

hristov4• 4 years ago

Less license fees means lower costs. But, more importantly, an open ISA means everyone can design for it, which means more competition which means much lower costs.

bsder• 4 years ago

Industry wants RISC-V too.

Only in China. And only at the bottom.

The ARM "premium" is a rounding error in anything that isn't a straight race to the garbage dump.

RISC-V, however, is a highly welcome development in all the <10 cent microcontrollers which have no standards, no tooling, no ISA, etc.

photonbeam5• 4 years ago

ARM doesnt cover every single point on the power/perf/area/price graphs, so riscv will at least give companies the opportunity to fill those gaps

2bitencryption• 4 years ago

Someone fill me in - are all my understandings here correct?

1. ARM is a RISC architecture, but it is proprietary/licensed, subject to export law, etc.

2. ARM is having a heyday, powering just about every mobile device, plus Apple's recent M1/M2 chips, and is also becoming more common on supercomputers and on servers

3. RISC-V is also a RISC, as the name implies, but is owned by a non-profit and intends to be open and easy to license

So next I would ask, do recent developments that make ARM so promising also make RISC-V promising? Do the decades of work that it took to make ARM the rising star also apply to RISC-V? How far away is RISC-V from being competitive with ARM at a technical level? Or is it already there?

Bonus question... given that both ARM and RISC-V have similar goals, how feasible is an abstract layer on top of them? Meaning, five years from now, how possible is it that I have a RISC-V phone that can run ARM binaries, and and ARM phone that could run RISC-V binaries?

snvzz22• 4 years ago

How far away is RISC-V from being competitive with ARM at a technical level? Or is it already there?

RISC-V caught up, key functionality wise, with the set of extensions ratified in December 2021.

There's key advantages to RISC-V, licensing aside. It leverages industry experience and avoids many pitfalls thanks to not dragging any baggage.

Field experts such as Jim Keller sing praises about it.

philliphaydon3• 4 years ago

So I don’t understand any of this stuff. But does this mean applications built for ARM64. Like a .NET 7 app which targets linux-arm64 and runs on… say Ubuntu ARM. Will run on a RISC-V cpu?

KRAKRISMOTT• 4 years ago

The ISA standard only specifies the instruction set. The actual technology in pipelining designs and gate layouts are still proprietary. Are there significant advantages to having an open ISA? Better software support?

saagarjha2• 4 years ago

arm64 was essentially designed from scratch. What makes it have any more baggage than RISC-V?

wyldfire• 4 years ago

RISC-V caught up, key functionality wise, with the set of extensions ratified in December 2021.

Having an ISA with functionality parity is the table stakes. But having designs actually capable of outperforming the current generation of ARM cores will be a real challenge.

Can SoC vendors design their next generation with RISC-V application cores? Sure, but no one will want it if it's slower or results in lower battery life. So far they've mostly only dipped their toes in the water with RISC-V microcontrollers. Google's explicit desire for a tier-1 RISC-V Android probably will help break a stalemate and get SoC vendors to ship something. It will very likely not debut as a flagship. But releasing a RISC-V phone that performs "adequately" would be an accomplishment that will flush out a lot of issues.

pantalaimon3• 4 years ago

Bonus question... given that both ARM and RISC-V have similar goals, how feasible is an abstract layer on top of them? Meaning, five years from now, how possible is it that I have a RISC-V phone that can run ARM binaries, and and ARM phone that could run RISC-V binaries?

That’s called Java and Android already has it

bpye• 4 years ago

I'd say it's more along the lines of Qemu user emulation / Rosetta 2 / Microsoft's x64 on ARM64 JIT.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure the fact that RISC-V is RISC means much. Seemingly every new CPU ISA designed since 1990 has been RISC. Only Arm's has taken off in a big way outside specialist applications. CISC CPUs (x64) are still around and still competitive too.

kllrnohj5• 4 years ago

RISC vs. CISC is irrelevant.

ARM vs. RISC-V is irrelevant

The only thing that really ever matters is the quality of any given specific CPU implementation, which has almost nothing to do with CISC vs. RISC or the ISA[1]. x86 has been dominate for so incredibly long because Intel just consistently made the best processors around, and #2 in the space was also usually AMD. This is why Apple switched to Intel in the first place, after all. Don't forget that Apple switched off of RISC to CISC and got huge increases in performance & efficiency as a result.

Apple's M1/M2 are good because they invested an absolute shit-ton of money building up a seriously good in-house CPU team over the past 10 years, not because it uses ARM's ISA. In fact, M1/M2 support x86's memory model - it's a key reason that Rosetta 2 runs so fast.

So for a RISC-V phone to show up in let's say the mid-range or higher market and be competitive would take someone actually building a good RISC-V CPU implementation. Which maybe sifive will pull off - their new performance lineup looks decent enough on paper anyway. But that's also compared to the 2-year old Cortex A78 which is itself quite a ways behind Apple's M2 / Bionic A14. So that's what you really need to find for a RISC-V phone/laptop/whatever to be interesting - someone who can, ideally consistently, deliver a CPU core design that's competitive with {Apple, ARM, Intel, AMD}. And that list only even barely includes ARM - their CPU cores are by far the weakest of that set. Which is itself a significant asterisk on the whole "ARM servers!" thing.

1: the small but significant asterisk on that is it's plausible, if not likely, that Apple was able to build an 8-wide CPU frontend as a direct result of armv8 not being a VLA ISA whereas x86_64 is. However that's also arguably more a function of the ISA's encoding than the ISA or CISC vs. RISC debate. In theory you could have an x86_64 instruction set that's not VLA, just like ARM used to have thumb/thumb2 and non-thumb modes back in the day.

klelatti3• 4 years ago

And, and I can tell you that we got pretty far along with an internal Arm design, and it was very, very clear that you if you’re delivering a certain level of performance, the delta in power driven by the ISA is like 5 percent. [1]

Power matters a lot and 5% isn't almost nothing. And that's an estimate from an x86 vendor.

Agreed that it's almost certainly third though behind process and design. Intel's CPU leadership for a long time of course is not unconnected with its process leadership.

[1] https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/10/03/the-steady-hand-guid...

solarkraft4• 4 years ago

Does this mean that vendors with already good ARM CPUs can fairly easily convert them into good RISC-V CPUs? If so, is anyone doing it?

mepian• 4 years ago

It's exciting that Google specifically requires memory tagging support and the J extension (Standard Extension for Dynamically Translated Languages) from RISC-V processors that are going to run Android: https://youtu.be/70O_RmTWP58?t=651

snvzz22• 4 years ago

Defining the requirements is one point, one task in that list. Developing J is another.

Note that J is not a ratified extension, or even close to being so. It has been moving slowly for years (been a low priority), and now it is finally getting some attention, as higher priority items (such as H, B, V and Zc) are either done or final stages.

viraptor5• 4 years ago

Could Google pull another QUIC here? "Here's a thing we implemented and deployed, wanna polish it up and call http2?" (Yes, I'm ignoring nuance here)

pjmlp• 4 years ago

There is also "Member Day Session: J Extension Group Meeting"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EEzXsA--9Y

bloopernova• 4 years ago

Not a hardware/chip person here, so I found this text helpful regarding memory tagging:

"As one might expect, the Arm64 architecture uses 64-bit pointers to address memory. There is no need (yet!) for an address space that large, though, so normally only 48 of those bits are actually used by the hardware."

...

"MTE allows the storage of a four-bit "key" in bits 59-56 of a virtual address — the lower "nibble" of the top byte. It is also possible to associate a specific key value with one or more 16-byte ranges of memory. When a pointer is dereferenced, the key stored in the pointer itself is compared to that associated with the memory the pointer references; if the two do not match, a trap may be raised."

From this article at the ever-wonderful lwn.net: https://lwn.net/Articles/834289/

johnea• 4 years ago

ARM is on the way out...

Also, watch for Si implanted back doors. Guaranteed to happen...

One big impediment to RISC-V now is GPU, but that is also coming on fast: https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/risc-v-universe-grows-...

azinman2• 4 years ago

The result is that Chinese tech companies are rallying around RISC-V as the future chip architecture.

That’s really the motivation here. I guess google is trying to stay ahead of being replaced in China?

To me, as a westerner, I‘d rather see ARM succeed than RISC-V. Despite ironically being designed in the west, rallying the world around an open instruction set I believe will primarily benefit China, who wants to lead in semiconductors. It gives them the ability to become big players without having to push a new ISA on the world, and if it becomes dominant on mobile, they could see themselves replacing Qualcomm, Intel etc. It is a zero sum game all around.

snvzz22• 4 years ago

If the west does not adopt RISC-V, then it will simply fall behind China.

I don't think this is something we want.

AnimalMuppet• 4 years ago

That assumes that RISC-V is a competitive advantage over ARM and x86. While I have no particular grounds for pessimism about RISC-V, it seems a bit premature to assume that it's better in practice than those others.

talideon• 4 years ago

China has spent ages trying to get their local MIPS derivatives to a place where they're competitive, but haven't succeeded. Adopting or not adopting RISC-V (which is only an ISA, not an actual platform) won't make a lick of difference.

Dalewyn• 4 years ago

The flip side is that China is pushing RISC-V because they can't develop their own homegrown microarchitecture.

This is China we're talking about here, they aren't rallying behind RISC-V because they like it. It's because they can't develop anything better than RISC-V, can't license x86 or ARM (which clearly are better than RISC-V) for obvious reasons, and so they're stuck with what they can get their grubby hands on.

If the west widely supports and adopts RISC-V in a way that doesn't exclude China, we are quite literally just playing into Chinese hands like the west has done time and time again.

Nurturing RISC-V in itself is a noble endeavour, but we must do so in a manner that doesn't hoist our own god damn petards.

rfoo• 4 years ago

Then why Chinese (if they can be treated as a whole) don't just rally LoongArch?

throwaway4good2• 4 years ago

This is just incorrect. Chinese companies have plenty of design chops.

arlort• 4 years ago

I (also westerner) would still like to see RISC-V succeed, doesn't mean ARM has to fail but open competition is likely to be good in the long term.

An ISA won't let China become a leader in semiconductor unless they implement it better than both western implementations of RISC-V and than ARM/Intel, the only thing it does is give an incentive to not rest on our laurels

I am also fundamentally uneasy about fundamental technologies being based on just a handful of companies, whether they are western or not, I know it happens but the less it happens the better imo

c_yh• 4 years ago

Envy that you can become a member of Westerners.

throwaway4good2• 4 years ago

“ It is a zero sum game all around.”

It is not. We consumers benefit from competition, and loose from higher prices and poorer products produced by monopolies.

mschuster91• 4 years ago

We consumers benefit from competition

Look where the "competition" of the last 30 years brought the Western world: domestic electronics production is all but dead outside of military and R&D depending on quick turnaround because it got moved off to China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea, domestic pharmaceutics and chemical production is all but dead because India and China are absurdly cheaper, domestic steel production has taken serious hits for the same reason, animal welfare in farming is all but gone with farmers preventively feeding antibiotics to avoid immediate population collapse because the large meatpackers and chain stores act absolutely ruthlessly to make more profit, wages have gone down across the board when compared with inflation and large parts of our societies have no emergency funds...

and loose from higher prices and poorer products produced by monopolies.

Competition itself is not bad, it keeps societies from stagnation - but too much and the side effects are now worse than the starting point. The Western world after decades of "competition" now depends on genocidal dictatorships (China), ordinary dictatorships (oil sheiks) and declining democracies (India) for its basic survival, and inside of our economies we got monopolies and oligopolies at a scale that was unbelievable even in the 90s.

adithyassekhar• 4 years ago

This is just lopsided thinking. I have the exact opposite opinion as someone not from the west, we need open instructions to be free from the clutches of everything controlled by western countries, we need competition.

shrimp_emoji• 4 years ago

True patriots use Windows.

Linux? What are you, a Chicom? Did you know they literally use that in North Korea?[0]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

garganzol• 4 years ago

Commoditize your complement [0], right?

[0] https://www.gwern.net/Complement

jbirer• 4 years ago

God I love Google.

mozball• 4 years ago

Would moving to RISC-V have any effect on Android's fragmentation and update problem (due to Qualcomm's stranglehold on the android ARM market)?

bayindirh3• 4 years ago

I don't think so. Moving to Fuchsia and producing SoCs with some closed parts will allow any vendor to obsolete any part without any problems. Stopping to provide drivers will make any IC as dead as a well cooked brick.

I think Fuchsia's main aim is to provide Google more control on the Android stack. "We will be able to do things more securely than Linux" reads like "We'll be able to close down devices even more while giving you a sense of openness" to me.

So, Google might be using RISC-V as another way to distance the platform from contemporary hardware/software ecosystem and make it practically harder to tinker/root/exploit beyond their (financial) comfort zone.

snvzz22• 4 years ago

Stopping to provide drivers will make any IC as dead as a well cooked brick.

AIUI Fuchsia got stable driver APIs/ABIs, so the Linux rules do not apply.

TazeTSchnitzel2• 4 years ago

The Android software update problem is a tragedy that will not end with the introduction of RISC-V. Hell, it could get worse.

kernal5• 4 years ago

The top Android OEM's now offer 3/4 OS updates and 5 years of security updates. It's time to let go of the "Android software update problem is a tragedy" criticism. And if you still want to use your Android phone after 5 years there's a good chance that there will be a LineageOS build for it.

mastax• 4 years ago

The world's biggest companies are building trillion-dollar businesses on top of the Arm architecture, and the realities of product design mean all these plans are two to five years out. So for Arm, giving off a vibe of "instability" is probably the single biggest thing it can do to drive away customers.

stonogo3• 4 years ago

With a permissively licensed chip running a permissively licensed Fuchsia kernel and the permissively licensed Android runtime atop that, Google can finally explicitly slam the door on people who think they get to contribute to Google projects, which should save a ton of money over the bureaucratic-slow-march approach they take today.

Because vendors won't have to release device kernels any more, and will be able to use arbitrary ISA extensions they're under no impulse to distribute, the industry will achieve the ultimate nirvana last enjoyed by AT&T before the breakup -- this hardware is not yours, we will not be releasing technical information about it, and God help you if we catch you opening it up!

It's been a long road but I really think we'll see the return of the "no user serviceable parts inside" sticker, only for phone software this time around.

jacooper• 4 years ago

Hoppefully by that time Right to repair laws would be already set.

Also this should push anyone over the edge about using copyleft licenses, if you are complaining about unusable android without google services now, having no Roms all together is even worse.

phh2• 4 years ago

Google "wants" that, but doesn't seem to push forward on that matter. AOSP gerrit received risc-v jvm CLs 2 years ago from external contributors, and didn't merge any. (sorry, I have no source from Google's gerrit since they regularly clean it up, but you can find https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/21/android_riscv_port/ for related info )

Current state of Android RISC-V support 2 years after those ignored contribution is literally "we have a working libc", which isn't great. My understanding of Google's presentation is that Android 14 (Q3 2023) will have interpreter-only jvm support for RISC-V, no JIT/AOT. (I'm surprised there is no pure C interpreter that would work anywhere, but well). So decent RISC-V support in Android may happen for Android 15, so Q3 2024.

Will there be weird ABI/ISA issues that will need few versions to iron out? Hard to say, armv5 didn't go smoothly, nor armv7 (hi neon-less nvidia), and risc-v's modularity might prove to be challenging on that regard.

Overall, even though Google/Android doesn't seem as pushy on risc-v as they pretend to be, I'd say Google/Android will indeed be ready when the risc-v industry is ready for prime time.

Conan_Kudo2• 4 years ago

Nobody really wanted to integrate RISC-V support anywhere while the ISA and ABI was unstable. That only really got finalized last year, so I am not surprised that it took this long.

packetlost3• 4 years ago

This actually seems like the most reasonable reason to me. It wasn't stable, there was nobody (planning) on making RISC-V devices on which you'd want to run Android, and compiler support was far behind. We're in a very different place now, I would have made that same call (though perhaps would have given more reasoning to reduce speculation).

fulafel• 4 years ago

Is this more about the ABI? I couldn't find incompatible userspace ISA changes since many years (things sounded to have settled down since a while even in 2016: https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/riscv-spec-v2.1...). The RISC-V Linux port was also merged to mainline in 2017 and presumably been living under the stern binary & ABI compatibility rules there.

photonbeam5• 4 years ago

My guess is that theyve only recently been asked by handset manufacturers to consider non-ARM chips, for example this would be a great way for Qualcomm to gain leverage over ARM given the recent lawsuit

kllrnohj5• 4 years ago

Android has official x86 & x86_64 support and used to have MIPS support back when MIPS still existed, so this isn't the first "not-ARM" support to happen.

But the change from ignoring risc-v contributions to saying it's important probably did come from a significant SoC manufacturer pushing for it, yeah.

packetlost3• 4 years ago

I'm aware of at least one Chinese manufacturer building a RISC-V based smartphone

phh2• 4 years ago

Another possible guess, is that Google wants to start making their own CPU cores to beat Apple (I'm more along your guess, but I've seen so much Pixel-first AOSP development, that I have to doubt)

izacus3• 4 years ago

What would be the correct way to handle this in your opinion then? Invest in migrating a massive OS onto the new arch before it's stabilized and has a working SoC with 3D acceleration (which Android needs)?

solarkraft4• 4 years ago

The timeline looks similar to when I expect the first RISC-V consumer devices to be ready, so they'll be ready in time for that.

The downside is that developers won't be able to test their stuff on the dev boards that are already available, which may harm the ecosystem on launch.

college_physics• 4 years ago

RISC-V is mentioned (once) in RFC-0111 (Initial Fuchsia hardware platform specifications)

https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/contribute/governance/rfcs/0...

Nomentatus2• 4 years ago

Seemingly only yesterday, there was a lively rather abstract debate here on HN over the reasons why open hardware wasn't a thing. Many said it wouldn't ever exist and had good arguments for that. (Which arguments irritated me.) Irritation gone.

Google wants RISC-V to be a “tier-1” Android architecture

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