Android is used to support different architectures – ARM, x86, MIPS. While x86 is still technically supported, the choice of smartphones, tablets and smartwatches is down to just ARM. This means that anyone who owns ARM will have an impact on the ecosystem. Now Qualcomm and Google have announced that they are working on an alternative architecture.
You may or may not have heard of RISC-V (pronounced “Risk Five”). It’s an open source manual for CPUs that has been gaining a lot of interest lately. Its open source nature means chipset designers don’t need to pay royalties like they do with ARM. ARM restricts who can create custom CPU cores (which costs more).
Google and Qualcomm are starting small – literally, the two companies are working on RISC-V-based Snapdragon Wear chipsets that will “power the next generation of Wear OS solutions”.
Android doesn’t yet have official support for RISC-V, as the instruction set is so new that some parts are still in development and Google hasn’t decided on the initial features needed. But since Wear OS is based on Android, this should be a stepping stone for more powerful chipsets used in phones and tablets in the future.
This is why RISC-V is such a big deal. ARM charges like Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek and others to use their Cortex CPU designs. Some companies like Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm (sometimes) use CPUs they design in-house, but it requires expensive “architecture licensing.”
Now, just because RISC-V is open source doesn’t mean all CPUs are based on it. There are some, but Qualcomm designs its own, demonstrating its expertise in developing efficient and high-performance chips. This gives Google (and the Android ecosystem as a whole) an alternative platform – to use as a fallback and leverage when negotiating prices with ARM.
Qualcomm tends to launch new generations of Wear every two years – the 2100 in 2016, the 3100 in 2018, the 4100 in 2020 and most recently the W5 in 2022. So, W6 next year? It’s possible, but the company’s press release ends with the vague statement that “commercial product launch of the RISC-V wearable solution will be announced at a later date.”
P.S. RISC-V has been around for a few years and has attracted a lot of attention from other companies – big names like Bosch, Infineon, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP and Qualcomm have joined to accelerate the development of RISC-V hardware. Others, such as Western Digital, used previously licensed designs from ARM, Intel and others to use RISC-V cores in its flash controllers, adding to the cost of millions of SSDs.
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