“Google Wants RISC-V to Be a ‘tier-1’ Android Architecture: Google’s Keynote at the RISC-V Summit Promises Official, Polished Support”, Ron Amadeo2023-01-03 (, ; backlinks)⁠:

Over the holiday break, the footage from the recent “RISC-V Summit” was posted for the world to see, and would you believe that Google showed up to profess its love for the up-and-coming CPU architecture?

…Google’s keynote at the RISC-V Summit was all about bold proclamations, though. Lars Bergstrom, Android’s director of engineering, wants RISC-V to be seen as a “tier-1 platform” in Android, which would put it on par with Arm. That’s a big change from just 6 months ago. Bergstrom says getting optimized Android builds on RISC-V will take “a lot of work” and outlined a roadmap that will take “a few years” to come to fruition, but AOSP started to land official RISC-V patches back in September.

The build system is up and running, and anyone can grab the latest riscv64 branch whenever they want—and yes, in line with its recent Arm work, 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 the start of 2023, with Android RunTime (ART) support for Java workloads following during Q1.” One of Bergstrom’s slides featured the above “to-do” list, 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 need to do all of the work to move from a prototype and something that runs to something that’s really singing—that’s showing off the best-in-class processors that [RISC-V International Chairman Krste Asanović] was mentioning in the previous talk.”…What’s fun about the Android RunTime is that when ART supports RISC-V, a big chunk of the Android app ecosystem will come with it. Android apps ship as Java code, and the way that becomes an ARM app is when the Android Runtime compiles it into ARM code. Instead, it will soon compile into RISC-V code with no extra work from the developer. Native code that isn’t written in Java, like games and component libraries, will need to be ported over, but starting with Java code is a big jump-start.

Arm has become an unstable, volatile business partner: …the biggest reason RISC-V seems inevitable is that current CPU front-runner Arm has become an unstable, volatile company, and it feels like any viable alternative would have a good shot at success right now.

Just look at Arm’s behavior over the last few years. After a few bad bets in 2020, we saw Arm’s owner, Softbank, slap a “for sale” sign on the world’s biggest mobile chip company and start taking sales meetings. For a while, it looked like Nvidia—a company notorious for being difficult to work with—was going to be Arm’s new owner, bundle the chip designs with GPUs, and find itself a new business partner with some of its most hated rivals. Regulators around the world eventually shut that deal down, and now Softbank wants Arm to have an IPO, which may or may not happen, depending on how the economy goes. [This list doesn’t even include the huge price-hikes] When the buyout plans fell through, Arm pivoted to suing one of its biggest customers, Qualcomm, over its purchase of the chip-design firm Nuvia.

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 5 years out. So for Arm, giving off a vibe of “instability” is probably the single biggest thing it can do to drive away customers. It would be great if Arm chips are cheap and fast and have a great ecosystem, but before any of that matters, customers need to be confident in the company’s future. When Arm regularly spent the last 3 years lighting up the tech news headlines, can anyone say where the company will be in 5 years? Arm’s licensing model traditionally made it a stable, neutral, reliable company, and for customers, it’s probably completely unacceptable that Arm is acting like this.

The other reason to kick Arm to the curb is the US-China trade war…RISC-V is seen as a way to be less reliant on the West…The result is that Chinese tech companies are rallying around RISC-V as the future chip architecture. One Chinese company hit by US export restrictions, the e-commerce giant Alibaba, has been the leading force in bringing RISC-V support to Android, and with Chinese companies playing a huge part in the Android ecosystem, it makes sense that Google would throw open the doors for official support. Now we just need someone to build a phone.