As the title asks, what is risc-v? I’m trying to learn more about web development and I find it to be tough to wrap my head around certain concepts.
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It’s a processor type. For a long time the trend in cpu design was to have a bajillion instructions that were big and complicated, risc was a move to have a cpu with as few instructions as possible and just run them very fast. 30 years later risc processors are pretty complicated too and the complicated CPUs stopped having the big penalty for having tons of instructions so it’s not as big a deal and now a lot of focus on risc stuff is to be the open standard or something and it sees use sometimes, but not really directly in anything major. It won’t come up in web design really.
It’s a CPU architecture.
* x86 CPUs include those from Intel and AMD, and are mostly found in PCs, laptops and servers.
* Arm CPUs all follow an instruction set made by (and mostly follow designs licensed from) Arm, and are manufactured by a variety of vendors. They are found in phones, tablets, and a vast range of embedded appliances, and are starting to be seen in laptops and servers.
* RISC-V is a competing architecture. Its advantage is that it is not encumbered by intellectual property rights: no patents, no copyrights, no trade secrets. This means that *anyone* can manufacture one, and use it for whatever purpose they like.
At the moment, RISC-V is and up-and-comer, and it’ll be a few more years before it gains wide use. And it’s yet to be seen how successful it will be: It might eat Arm’s lunch in the server space, and/or in the embedded space, or it might fizzle. It might be massively successful in China (because the US are blocking exports of some high tech to China, and a no-strings-attached architecture might thus be attractive), or it might not.
For web development, it doesn’t matter. Web development targets the common web platform (HTML, Javascript, http, etc.) and is deliberately abstracted away from machine-specific details like CPU, memory, etc.
The other answers aren’t quite right, so here’s my go at it.
RISC-V is “new” CPU ISA (Instruction Set Architecture). Which is a bit like the language of the processor if x86_64 is like English then RISC-V is like Russian. The major difference is in what the can understand and do in a single operation. Bit to get to that i need to explain quite a bit about CPU operation.
A processor has a few places to store data, mostly Memory and registers. You can imagine memory a bit like a street every address has a house on it, but in this case every address has a byte of data in it. Registers work a bit differently instead of an address they have a name like `RAX` which I’m pretty sure is “Register Accumulator eXtended” which exists on x86_64. usually there are only a handful of these registers x86_64 has 16 64bit general purpose registers like this one.
An instruction is one* thing the CPU can do and each one takes up a certain amount of memory. Back in the day when RAM was expensive Manufacturers would try to get a single operation to do common tasks in the least number instructions as they could. An example of this is the `lodsb` instruction, it does a series of things. First it reads a byte of memory at an address stored in a register, then it adds one to the address. This is two things and now that memory is cheap we can (and we do) do that in two instructions just fine. RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) breaks down these complex instructions into their smaller parts. So there is less to do for each instruction.
But all that is nothing new What makes RISC-V special is that the instruction set is open source. Anyone is allowed to use it, extend it and propose changes. Which allows it to be used in a variety of applications from storage controllers to GPU’s. Because all other ISA’s are behind a license. x86 chips can olny be bought from Intel or AMD, and ARM cores need to be licensed from ARM. RISC-V means that anyone can create their own chips that exactly fit the needs of the product.
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