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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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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