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 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.
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