A venture in retrotronics
Background: RISC-V
Open-source RISC processors making waves in research and industry
It's still early in terms of silicon implementations, tooling and operating system support, but the open RISC-V processor specification is making inroads in the processor world. As RISC-V Marketing Manager Ted Marena wrote at the beginning of last year on IEEE Times, RISC-V is to open hardware what Linux has been to open-source software.
According to Naveed Sherwani, the CEO of SiFive, today's complex chips are so expensive to develop that the situation for the chip industry is unhealthy: The cost of developing a chip is so high that no VCs will fund it and no young people will try it.
To research institutes, startups and government agencies involved in High-Performance Computing (HPC), and to bulk consumers of processing power, RISC-V provides an opportunity to participate and collaborate in creating a (European) technical and scientific ecosystem around an open design.