RISC-V

A processor understands only one particular language: its instruction set. This determines which basic operations the chip can perform — for example, adding two numbers or loading a value from memory. RISC-V is one such instruction set, but with one crucial difference: it is open. Any manufacturer may use it, modify it, and build it into their own chips — without permission and without fees. That may sound like a technical detail, but it has far-reaching economic consequences.

Why RISC-V is shaking up the chip industry

Until now, a small number of companies have controlled the languages that processors understand. ARM licenses its instruction set to chip manufacturers — for billions of dollars per year. Intel owns its x86 architecture outright and does not share it. Anyone wanting to build their own chip had to buy into this system. This severely limited smaller companies and countries without their own chip industry in particular.

RISC-V breaks open this model. Today, a start-up, a university, or a nation-state can design a processor based on RISC-V without being accountable to any other company. This is comparable to how Linux opened up the operating system market: not by being the best, but by excluding no one. RISC-V is particularly strategically significant for countries like China, which could lose access to Western chip licenses due to export restrictions.

What’s behind the instruction set

The “RISC” in RISC-V stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer. The idea behind it is old: a processor that only knows a few, simple instructions can execute them very quickly and efficiently. The opposing principle is called CISC and is found, for example, in Intel processors: there, many complex instructions exist that accomplish more at once, but also require more circuitry. ARM likewise follows the RISC principle — so RISC-V is not a completely new approach, but rather an open reinvention of a proven idea.

The instruction set itself originated in 2010 at the University of California, Berkeley, originally as a teaching project. The “V” stands for the fifth generation of RISC architectures developed there. Today, a non-profit organization called RISC-V International maintains the standard. Members include Google, Qualcomm, and Western Digital, among others. Important: RISC-V describes only the instruction set, i.e., the language. How the actual chip core is internally structured is left up to the manufacturer. This explains why RISC-V processors can be so varied — ranging from tiny microcontrollers to powerful server chips.

A common misconception: RISC-V is not a finished chip that you can buy. It is a specification, a document. The actual chip is then designed by a company based on this specification.

RISC-V in products and in the headlines

RISC-V is now found in hundreds of millions of devices sold — mostly invisibly. Western Digital builds RISC-V cores into its hard drive controllers. Various microcontrollers, i.e., tiny specialized processors in household appliances and industrial machines, run on RISC-V. Interest is also growing in the AI hardware sector: companies developing their own chips for machine learning use RISC-V as a control processor alongside their specialized computing units.

In the news, RISC-V mainly appears in the context of the semiconductor dispute between the US and China. Since ARM and Intel are subject to American export restrictions, China is investing massively in RISC-V-based in-house developments — with the goal of becoming less dependent on Western technology. This makes RISC-V more than just a technical standard: it is an instrument of technology policy.

For consumers, RISC-V is barely noticeable for now. Smartphones and laptops continue to run on ARM or x86 processors, respectively, because decades of optimized software exist for them that cannot simply be ported. But in new markets — AI accelerators, space technology, specialized industrial chips — RISC-V has a real chance of establishing itself as the standard.