Qualcomm, Intel and Samsung invest in RISC-V companies

SiFive, a well-known supplier of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions, announced that it has completed a new round of investment of $65.4 million, and Qualcomm is an important player. In addition to Qualcomm, Intel and Samsung also invested some money for the company.

RISC-V is an open source instruction set architecture (ISA) based on the Reduced Instruction Set (RISC) principle. The RISC-V instruction set is freely available for any purpose compared to most instruction sets, allowing anyone to design, manufacture, and sell RISC-V chips and software. The design of the RISC-V instruction set takes into account the small, fast, low-power reality, but does not over-design specific micro-architectures.

Some analysts said that the flexibility and openness of RISC-V made Qualcomm extremely interested. It is reported that according to SiFive's current design capabilities, it takes only one to three months to develop a new RISC-V IP, and ARM chips often take one year or more.

In addition, the high licensing fees of the ARM architecture have become a major obstacle. Compared to RISC-V's open source, open, streamlined and flexible features, RISC-V is tempting for many companies.