Qualcomm announces first-ever mass-market RISC-V Android SoC
arstechnica.com
Before anyone gets too excited, they're going to use RISC-V for watches and such (Wear OS), but it's still a big step towards having Android phones use RISC-V and major adoption. Maybe RISC-V is closer than we thought!
The Sipeed Lichee Pi 4A coming with Debian pre-installed, is arguably the first consumer RISC-V device.
Qualcomm has good reason to focus on RISC-V. I'm expecting them to bring out SoCs as soon as they can. And with the Nuvia team, they have the design prowess to produce some very performant silicon.
If I understand this correctly, this is an open source processor architecture?
It is.
It used to live in shadow of arm until the China ban came up. They funnel the money into riscv which lead to itsquick rise
It's not that, it was nvidia almost buying arm which scared everyone shitless.
Aside from furthering the development of the architecture (I assume they are contributing and not just taking), It's meaningless as Qualcomm couldn't give two shits about open source chip documentation for the chips they release. I'm only interested in a native Linux phone. Meaning no BSP garbage.
Yet another example of leeching off of open source and not giving back anything meaningful.