Google officially announces that Android will support RISC-V instruction set architecture

Thanks to the CTOnews.com netizen Mr. Air, Coje_He for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com January 5, Google has officially announced that Android will support the RISC-V instruction set architecture. The announcement comes from the RISC-V summit held last December.

RISC-V is the reduced instruction set computer V architecture, which is an open, free-to-use standard without license or royalties. In essence, it is a competitor to ARM and x86 architectures on which companies can build chipsets. Especially those companies that aim to make low-cost processors or reduce their dependence on ARM designs, Intel or AMD.

Currently, users can download a version of Android with very limited support for RISC-V, but it does not support Android Runtime (ART) for Java workloads. Most Android applications are released in Java code, which means that very few applications currently support RISC-V on Android. Now, Google says official simulator support is coming, while ART support is expected to arrive sometime in the first quarter of 2023.

Once ART support arrives, Java can be translated into RISC-V to some extent, so most Android applications will run without extra work for developers.

Speaking at the RISC-V summit, Lars Bergstrom, Google's Android engineering director, said he wanted RISC-V to be seen as a "first-tier platform" in Android.

CTOnews.com learned that Android's support for RISC-V is accelerating, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) project began to add formal RISC-V patches last September, and now anyone can try the riscv64 branch of Android.

Google's increased support for RISC-V may be related to the instability of ARM over the past few years. Softbank Corp., the parent company of ARM, tried to sell it to Nvidia and prepared to take the company public after failure. At the same time, ARM is still fighting a lawsuit with its biggest customer, Qualcomm, and so on.