Google officially announced that Android will support the RISC-V instruction set architecture

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IT House News on January 5th, Google has officially announced that Android will support the RISC-V instruction set architecture. The announcement comes from the RISC-V Summit held last December.

RISC-V is the Reduced Instruction Set Computer V Architecture, an open, free-to-use standard that requires no licenses or royalties. Essentially, it’s a competitor to the ARM and x86 architectures on which companies can build chipsets. Especially those that aim to make low-cost processors or reduce their reliance on ARM designs, Intel or AMD.

Currently, users can download a version of Android with very limited support for RISC-V, but it does not support the Android Runtime (ART) for Java workloads. Most Android applications are distributed using Java code, which means that almost no applications will support RISC-V on Android at present. Now, Google says that official emulator support is coming, while ART support is expected to arrive sometime in the first quarter of 2023.

Once ART support arrives, Java can be translated to RISC-V to some degree, so most Android apps will run with no extra work from developers.

Speaking at the RISC-V Summit, Lars Bergstrom, Google’s director of Android engineering, said he wants RISC-V to be considered a “first-tier platform” in Android.

IT Home learned that Android’s support for RISC-V is accelerating. Last September, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) project began to add official RISC-V patches. Now anyone can try Android’s riscv64 branch.

Google’s increased support for RISC-V may be related to the instability of the ARM company in the past few years. ARM parent company Softbank tried to sell it to Nvidia, and then prepared to take the company public after failing. At the same time ARM is still fighting with its largest customer Qualcomm, etc.

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