Mobile phones, including the best Android phones out there, are almost all running on Arm chip architecture—even Apple’s custom silicon is based on Arm reference designs. However, Arm has proven to be a less reliable partner in recent years, with its owner Softbank seriously considering selling it. Google is apparently seeing these risks as dire enough to invest into supporting a completely different chip technology, namely the open-source RISC-V architecture.
You’re forgiven if you haven’t heard of RISC-V so far, pronounced “Risk Five.” It’s an open-source alternative to proprietary CPU architectures like ARMv8 or Intel’s x86, which manufacturers and operating system makers have to pay royalty fees for. The architecture has been around since 2010, and it was created with precisely that open-access idea in mind that counters traditional competitors.
Google still has a long journey ahead, but the company wants to offer early emulator support for developers to play with the architecture this year, automatically translating apps written in Java into RISC-V instructions.
This looks very interesting, but nothing will happen in the short term around this. It’s clear that Google is laying a foundation to switch to another architecture in case it is ever forced to.
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With Arm becoming less reliable, Android could soon support the up-and-coming RISC-V architecture
