Back in early 2023, Google announced that it was working on enabling support for the RISC-V architecture in Android. RISC-V is an open instruction set architecture that’s grown in popularity in recent years since hardware makers don’t need to pay a licensing fee to build RISC-V chips. Some Android devices already ship with chipsets based on RISC-V, though these chipsets typically run something other than Android and act as a co-processor to the device’s main, typically Arm-based processor.
Late last year, chip maker Qualcomm announced that it was designing a wearable chipset based on RISC-V and that this chipset would run on Google’s Android-based Wear OS platform. Once released, these Wear OS smartwatches would be the first commercial RISC-V hardware to run a Google-certified Android build. To make that happen, though, Google must devote a lot of engineering resources to make Android — and its underlying Linux kernel fork — boot on RISC-V hardware. Google has already done much of the work to enable RISC-V support in Android, though there’s quite a bit of work still ahead.
https://www.androidauthority.com/android-drop-risc-v-kernel-3438330/
Google ei enää tue Risc-V käskykantaa. Tämä on tavallaan harmillista, mutta koska Risc-V puhelimia ei ole edes olemassa niin tuen lopettaminen on ymmärrettävää. Laajalti käytetty Arm käskykanta on osoittaunut riittäväksi, etenkin kun Risc-V ei ole kyennyt tarjoamaan oikeastaan mitään uutta mitä Armi ei kykenisi tekemään. Täytyy muistaa, että uuden käskykannan tukeminen on kallista puuhaa ja vaatii isoja investointeja. Turhien arkkitehtuurien tukea tulee välttää. Risc-V voidaan silti kehittää eteenpäin monissa sovellutuksissa.
