The RISC-V architecture and applications
The RISC-V architecture, publicly announced in 2014, was developed at the University of California, Berkeley, by Yunsup Lee, Krste Asanović, David A. Patterson, and Andrew Waterman. This effort followed four previous major RISC architectural design projects at UC Berkeley, leading to the name RISC-V, where V represents the Roman numeral five.
The RISC-V project began as a clean sheet with several major goals:
- Design a RISC instruction set architecture (ISA) suitable for use across a wide spectrum of applications, from micro-power embedded devices to high-performance cloud server multiprocessors.
- Provide an ISA that is free to use by anyone, for any application. This contrasts with the ISAs of almost all other commercially available processors, which are the carefully guarded intellectual property of the company that owns them.
- Incorporate lessons learned from previous decades of processor design, avoiding wrong...
