Google has officially announced that Android will support the RISC-V instruction set architecture. The announcement comes from the RISC-V summit held last month.
For the unfamiliar, RISC-V is the V architecture of the reduced instruction set computer, an open standard and free of charge with no licensing fees or royalties. Essentially, it is a competitor to the ARM and x86 architectures that companies can build chipsets on top of. Especially companies that aim to make processors at low cost or reduce their reliance on designs from ARM, Intel or AMD.
A very limited version of Android is currently available for download for RISC-V, but it does not support the Android Runtime (ART) for Java workloads. Most Android apps ship in Java code, which means that currently hardly any apps will support RISC-V on Android. However, Google says official emulator support is coming soon, while ART support is expected to arrive in Q1.
Once ART support arrives, it will more or less translate Java for RISC-V, so most Android apps should work without any extra effort from developers.
Android’s director of engineering, Lars Bergstrom, addressed the stage at the RISC-V Summit saying he wants it to be seen as a “top tier platform” in Android.
Start a new Thread